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

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

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Holocaust Denial and Distortion - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Holocaust denial is any attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism, prejudice against or hatred of Jews.

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How Anne Frank's Diary Survived (upstanders) article and podcast

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How Anne Frank's Diary Survived (upstanders) article and podcast

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Most people have heard the name Anne Frank, and many have read her diary, which details her and her family's time spent in hiding during the German occupation of Amsterdam in World War II. Less known are Miep and Jan Gies, two people who helped shelter the Frank family and preserved Anne Frank's diary after she was captured. In this episode, Alison Leslie Gold, who co-authored Miep's memoir, shares their history and what we can take away from their stories. And we'll hear from the co-creators and star of the National Geographic limited series A Small Light about how anyone can step up and be a hero.

Listen on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY BRIGGS (HOST): "On Friday, June 12th, I woke up at six o'clock and no wonder; it was my birthday."

These are the unassuming opening lines of one of history's most important books: Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. First published in 1947, it's the real journal of a teenager who received it as a birthday gift when she turned thirteen in 1942. Her first few entries start with her celebrations-the presents, a party-but then in her third entry, she writes about her life as a Jewish girl in Nazi-controlled Amsterdam.

Anne details how Jews were forced to wear yellow stars on their clothes. They couldn't own bicycles, ride trains, or drive a car. Jewish children had to go to Jewish schools. They could only shop between three and five and had to be indoors by 8 o'clock. Jews were banned from theaters and public sports venues-so no playing tennis, hockey, or swimming. As Anne wrote, "So we could not do this and were forbidden to do that. But life went on in spite of it all."

But then, life changed. Less than a month after Anne's birthday, the Nazis summoned her sister Margot to a labor camp, and the Franks had to go into hiding. They lived in the back rooms of her father's office building, which Anne dubbed the Secret Annex. She brought her diary with her, and over the next two years documented her life, including her thoughts about growing up, her relationships with her family, everyday life in the Annex, and the ongoing events of World War II.

On November 8th, 1943, about a year after they went into hiding, Anne wrote, "I see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter."

And the danger did come. On August 4th, 1944, Gestapo officers broke into the annex and arrested the people living there. They were separated and sent to concentration camps. Anne did not survive the Holocaust, but her diary did, thanks in part to a woman named Miep Gies, who helped hide the Frank family during those two years. She would make trips to the Annex, bringing them groceries and supplies.

Here's Miep speaking to NPR's Susan Stamberg about what it was like to pick up the shopping list in the morning.

MIEP GIES (FROM NPR ARCHIVAL AUDIO): When I came in, nobody would speak, just standing in line and waiting for me to begin. It was always an awful moment for me because it showed how dependent these fine people felt on us. They would silently look up to me, except for Anne, who in a cheerful tone used to say, "Hello, Miep. And what is the news?"

BRIGGS: I'm Amy Briggs, executive editor of National Geographic History magazine, and you're listening to Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our complex and changing world.

Miep Gies passed away in 2010 at 100 years old. In the eighties, she and today's guest, Alison Leslie Gold, wrote a book called Anne Frank Remembered. It's an account of how Miep helped the Frank family. This week, we sit down with Alison to learn more about Miep and her husband Jan, their relationship with the Franks, and how Miep saved Anne's diary. We'll also hear from the co-creators of the Nat Geo limited series A Small Light about how anyone can step up and be a hero.

GIES (FROM NPR ARCHIVAL AUDIO): They say always that it's the past, that it's over. But it is not true. The past go always with you.

BRIGGS: More after the break.

ALISON LESLIE GOLD (AUTHOR): My name is Alison Leslie Gold. I'm an author. I've published fiction, nonfiction.

BRIGGS: Alison says she stumbled upon the story of Miep and Jan Gies purely by happenstance. In the 1980s, she was working as a researcher for a TV show when she heard about a man named Barry Spanjaard. He had written a book called Don't Fence Me In: An American Teenager in the Holocaust.

GOLD: And I thought it was a very moving story. And it seemed like it would be a wonderful thing to see if we could get them to do a show about him. So in the course of that, I met people connected to the Anne Frank world. And found out about Miep and Jan Gies. I don't want to get mystical, but it was-as it turned out, it was a total life changing experience.

BRIGGS: Though Miep and Jan had been interviewed before, they had never written a book and had mostly stayed out of the spotlight.

GOLD: I thought, here's a story that's untold, like a little piece of endangered history. And these people are old. She was in fact the age I am now. She was 76. I'm 77. And he was almost 80. And I thought if somebody doesn't get their side of the story soon, this is all going to wash away in time. And I wrote to them and said, Could I come and interview you for an article? And they said OK, and I went and interviewed them. And somehow through an agent in Hollywood, it was sent to a New York agent who said, This is a book. This is a book. So suddenly there were Miep, Jan, and I-all of us sort of neophytes-with this rather grand offer from several publishers to write a book.

And that was the beginning. And it was really, as it turned out, it totally altered my life. I mean, because suddenly I was part of something that meant something. And that-it sounds very corny, but that side of me woke up to what was meaningful and what wasn't. And we worked together for about two years on this book, mostly in Amsterdam. And, you know, those were incredible experiences. And being there for months at a time and going to their apartment every morning, and we were all scared to death. And Miep hardly spoke any English. In fact, as we were working she learned English because I was too stupid to learn Dutch. And the three of us would have coffee together and then we-I would collect their memories. Then we'd have lunch, and I'd leave. And every day we'd do that until I collected enough to do this book.

BRIGGS: Anne Frank Remembered -it's first published in the late 1980s, and the book tells the story of Miep. Who was Miep?

GOLD: Miep was born in Vienna. She was from a rather poor family, Catholic family, and through the interviews she never really liked speaking much about her family. She remembered the beginnings of World War I. At the end of the war, she was put on a train with a tag around her neck because she was starving. Dutch workers had started a program to help children, and she was ten years old and she was put on a train at the Vienna train station and knew nothing. And the train went to Holland, and they were taken off of the train, and a man, a Dutchman, came and saw her name and took her. And she went with him, and he brought her into his house and he had a wife and-I don't remember now-four or five of his own children. And she was welcomed into the family, and she was bathed and she was fed and put into school. And basically she liked it and she liked them. And she was very happy. And she learned Dutch very quickly. She was very smart. And after a few years when the time came to go home, she didn't want to.

BRIGGS: So Miep stayed in Amsterdam. When she was 24, she took a secretarial job with Anne's father, Otto Frank. At the time he owned a company that sold pectin, a powder that is used to make jam.

GOLD: The first thing he asked her to do wasn't to type or take dictation or anything. It was to go into the kitchen and make jam out of different fruits. So she did. She made jam and then he liked her and hired her, and she was the complaint department. When a housewife would screw up the recipe or something, they'd call and Miep would go through it and try to understand why it turned to mush instead of jam.

BRIGGS: So did Miep and Jan become close with the Franks? You know, just through work, it feels like they must have had a very tight relationship.

GOLD: Well, I don't know. I mean, it was very, very formal. I mean, she called him "Mr. Frank" until after the war. I mean, it's one of the moments in the book where he says, Please call me Otto. And she almost faints. And she says, OK, but not at the office. But what happened was, Mr. Frank lived in this little neighborhood in Amsterdam called the river quarter, where a lot of other Jewish refugees were living. And he and his wife would have a little gathering sometimes on a weekend, and they'd invite people for coffee and cake. And at one point Miep was invited and she brought Jan, and they were what the Franks called "our Dutch friends". I mean, they were really the only non-Jewish refugee people there. And they would go and they'd have a cup of coffee for an hour, and this is how they sort of got to know Anne. And then when they were having problems finding a place to live, it was Mr. Frank who connected her to the woman who became her landlady, who rented them a room. So there were little friendly things, but I wouldn't exactly call them that close or intimate in any way and certainly not on any personal level.

BRIGGS: And it's so interesting because I know-as, you know, Germany invades the Netherlands and, you know, with the occupation comes all of the policies and abuses that the Franks were, you know, running away from in Germany. And Otto Frank, as I understand it, is coming up with the plan to go into hiding, and enlisting Miep and her husband feels like a very big thing to ask someone and especially knowing that they had a more formal relationship. How did they have that bond? How did he-there's no way to know it. How did he know that Miep and Jan would be willing? And it's a very big thing to ask somebody to do.

GOLD: Well A, he didn't know. I mean, the first thing that brought them together in terms of something illegal was when Jews weren't allowed to own businesses. So Jan offered to pretend to have taken over the business. So it became Gies and Company, and Mr. Frank's name was taken off the letterhead even though he was still running the business. And then he quietly started preparing those rooms with supplies and furniture. And then what happened was, it wasn't really ready. He wasn't really finished. And then suddenly Margot received a postcard that she had to report for forced labor. She was 16. That's when forced labor began. And so suddenly Otto Frank had to hurry up and get them into hiding. And that's when he told the kids, and that's when he asked Miep.

Now, the way this was described to me, it was not discussed whether it was a big or small thing to ask. He simply asked, Would you be willing to help take care of us? Because she worked in the office. And as we of course know, he also asked three other people in the office to do the same thing. And she said that he asked her. He looked into her eyes. She looked into his eyes, and she said, Yes, of course. And he said, Don't answer so quickly. Think about it. This is very serious. And of course, unsaid was the fact that, you know, she could lose her life over something like that. And she says she said, Absolutely, yes. Period. Jan was a social worker. He'd come and have lunch with Miep every day. And once they were in hiding and the situation started to get kind of heavy, he would go and visit the hiding place every day and just say hello to everybody. I mean, people were starving for company. And he also did things, like he'd get library books and he'd bring them.

Everybody went and visited as much as they could, and Miep would go up and get the shopping list in the morning. Then she'd go back later and bring the shopping and Elli would go and eat lunch with them and eat their food. So I don't really know what the-whether there were mea culpas, or-in my interviews in the book, it was a very straightforward and no discussion. She just said, Yes, period. And never, ever regretted anything except for the fact that she failed and they died, except for Mr. Frank, which she never got over, really.

BRIGGS: So after they're arrested, you know, there's this memorable scene of Miep being in the Secret Annex and finding Anne's diary. What did she tell you about her preservation of the diary?

GOLD: After the arrest, when the Gestapo guy appeared one morning in August 1944, she was told to stay in the office. So she didn't see anything that had happened. And she also never saw them being taken away. She just heard their footsteps on the stairway as they were being brought down this old wooden stairway beside her desk.

Later, Miep wanted to go up and see what had gone on-what was left, how things were left. And through the whole hiding, Anne had used up her diary, her little famous red checkered diary very quickly, and Miep and Elli had saved paper-accounting sheets and things like that for them to use, for Anne to use, because she had started writing and writting and was writing more and more. So when they went up into the rooms, everything was a mess. They'd flung things all over the place, I guess looking for valuables. And Anne always kept her diary in her father's briefcase. And obviously they flung it out, and she saw it all spread out on the floor. And it struck her. She gathered up the diary and in her mind, the way she told it was-I mean, they really didn't know what was going to happen to these people. I mean, it was August. Everyone knew the Germans were losing, that the war was maybe going to be over soon. And she and Elli gathered up all the pages and in her mind it was to hold it and return it to Anne when Anne came back. So she took all the pages down and put them in her desk drawer. She didn't read it-you know, ever respectful. She didn't read it. She just left it there. And later she said that if she had read it, she would have destroyed it because it implicated too many people who could have been punished for appearing in the diary. And she just left it in the drawer. And then eventually, when Mr. Frank came back and he didn't know-he sort of knew his wife had died somehow because he was also in Auschwitz to the end and she was too. But Anne and Mrs. Van Daan and Margot had been moved to Bergen-Belsen, and so they didn't really know if they were alive or dead, and the chances were that they were healthy young girls, that they could have survived. So he was hoping that they waited. And then when a witness was found and he got a letter saying that they had both died. As soon as he got that letter, Miep went into her drawer, took the diary, and gave it to Mr. Frank. And that was the end of it for her. She never read it. And in fact, later when it was published, she didn't-Miep didn't want to read it. It was too upsetting until finally Mr. Frank bullied her into reading it. And finally she did and she was glad she did it. But, I mean, that's basically the story of the diary from Miep's point of view.

BRIGGS: I'm really curious too about Miep and Jan as people. I mean, in your telling, you know, you get the sense that they're very buttoned up, but also very warm and generous and kind. But when you look at their actions, they seem very-both of them-just so brave. Did that come across just in your day to day work with them?

GOLD: Well there was really no context for that. They were absolutely set in their ways. You could set your clock by when they ate meals, when they had coffee. I mean, you had five meals a day. You'd wake up at 8:30 would be breakfast, 10 o'clock would be coffee, 1 o'clock would be lunch, 4 o'clock would be tea, and 6:30 would be dinner, and then maybe decaf at 10:30 at night. But they weren't doormats in any way. You know, it's like-you know, they weren't do-gooders who ran around doing nice things. I mean, you know, they did this in the context of the history and I mean, he worked as a social worker and he retired at whatever it was-65 or two-he then was pretty much stayed at home and looked at his stamp collection. She did shopping, she made-had like the same food, had about six recipes for dinner and a few friends. Most of their friends had died off or were dying off. They weren't social. I dragged them, when we were in New York together, I dragged them to the theater to see Cats.

BRIGGS: (Laughs)

GOLD: She had a neighbor who was a widow who lived upstairs. And every night after dinner, she would go up and keep the woman company for like 20 minutes, have tea with her or something-visit her until the woman died. It was just the neighborly thing to do.

BRIGGS: How did they react to all the attention that came from the book? I mean, they sound like they like their lives. They like not being in the spotlight. But the book comes out and people want to know more about them.

GOLD: Well, she was sort of the spokesperson. He was very quiet. I mean, after the war, Jan had a headache for an entire year. I think his soul was really battered by that war. Not that hers wasn't, but that he was just a quiet man and a man of few words. He had a very good sense of humor, you know, very sort of wry sense of humor, but he sort of stayed in the background when the attention started really gathering steam. And her point of view that she is not a hero. I mean, this was her philosophy, her everything: that there was nothing. In fact it was one of the reasons-at first, they didn't really want to do a book because they didn't want any special attention. Because as they said to me, many people had helped other people during the war, and why should they get special attention just because it was Anne Frank and her family that they had accidentally helped? But to the end, I mean that was her thing, and I guess-hence the title of this miniseries, [A] Small Light. But she really believed it, wasn't-she wasn't being self-effacing or anything. I mean, she just meant it. It wasn't something for discussion. If your friend needs help, you help them, period.

BEL POWLEY AS MIEP GIES IN A SMALL LIGHT: This is the hiding place. But we have clients and sales people in and out of the building all day. There's a meeting this morning. They'll be here in 30 minutes, so you have to be quiet. You can't walk or talk or make any noise at all. You can't open the windows, and you can't use the loo. I know this is a lot to take in. Your family will be here later and we'll make this place into a home. If you need to cry, cry now. You have 30 minutes. I'll be back later to check on you. Margot, we made it. You're safe.

BRIGGS: That's actress Bel Powley playing Miep Gies in the recently released limited series A Small Light, produced by National Geographic. It tells the story of Miep, Jan, and the Frank family during the years spent hiding in the Secret Annex. I've seen some of the show and what struck me about it was it has these moments of levity, which I didn't expect given the overall horror of the situation. At a recent press junket, we asked the series co-creators, Joan Rater and Tony Phelan, about how they decided to include those moments in the show.

JOAN RATER (CO-CREATOR OF A SMALL LIGHT): We wanted to make the story relatable. We wanted to show what it was really like to be a young woman hiding a family. And I imagine that you're living through these moments sort of with humor, with fear, you know, with a wide range of emotions. It isn't all so reverent. You know, we have a tendency in telling historical stories to kind of put these people up on pedestals. But it's really important to us that we tell the story of an ordinary person that was just like you or me-could have been you, could have been me-that was asked to do something. And you know, she was this ordinary woman who then stepped into extraordinary circumstances, and we wanted to show what that really looked like. And I think that really looked like a regular person who cracks jokes, who's in love, who has fights with her husband, who gets angry, who wants to take a day off, who feels like, Why me, but continually does the right thing and steps into that annex and helps those people.

TONY PHELAN (CO-CREATOR OF A SMALL LIGHT): Well, I think the other thing is, is that Miep herself, there's plenty of tape of her interviews. Miep was a funny person. And I think that to take that away from the character is a real disservice to the character. We all just lived through the pandemic, and that's how I found myself getting through day by day, is to crack jokes in the face of really horrible things that you just do, because otherwise it's unbearable.

RATER: And the people in the annex also didn't know the end. They were-they had survived for two years. I think it's reasonable to assume they thought they were going to survive this. And so you have to imagine that there were moments of great joy and hope that we wanted to show. It was really important for us to show that.

BRIGGS: Joan also said that they felt like the show is relevant to our current times.

RATER: Well, anti-Semitism is on the rise. Nationalism is on the rise. I think it's relevant simply because it's so relatable to what's going on right now-frighteningly so. And the idea for us of showing what-you know, Miep never wanted to be called a hero, but she did heroic things. But they weren't, you know-sometimes it was just simply bringing people a loaf of bread. You know, taking the risk to go shopping and bring people food. To walk into the Annex and be the emotional support for the people who were hiding there. You know, so we wanted to really show that anybody can show empathy, that anybody can look outside their own self and extend a hand to another person in need. You know, sort of simple acts of human kindness.

BRIGGS: Fuel your curiosity with a free one-month trial subscription to Nat Geo Premium. You'll have unlimited access on any device, anywhere, ad-free with our app that lets you download stories to read offline. Explore every page ever published with a century of digital archives at your fingertips. Check it all out for free at natgeo.com/exploremore. There's a link in the show notes.

The first episode of A Small Light is streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu. New episodes premiere Mondays on National Geographic and stream the next day. And May is Jewish-American Heritage month. You can read all of Nat Geo's coverage online.

In addition to Anne Frank Remembered, Alison Leslie Gold wrote Memories of Anne Frank about Anne Frank's childhood friend Hannah Goslar and A Special Fate about a Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust.

That's all in the show notes, right there in your podcast app.
CREDITS
This week's Overheard episode is produced by Khari Douglas.

Our senior producers are Brian Gutierrez and Jacob Pinter.

Our senior editor is Eli Chen.

Our manager of audio is Carla Wills.

Our executive producer of audio is Davar Ardalan.

Our photo editor is Julie Hau.

Hansdale Hsu sound-designed this episode and composed our theme music.

The audio of Miep Gies was provided by NPR's Morning Edition.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners.

Michael Tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling.

Nathan Lump is National Geographic's editor in chief.

And I'm your host, Amy Briggs. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.
SHOW NOTES Want more?
The first episode of A Small Light is streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu. New episodes premiere Mondays on National Geographic and stream the next day.

Learn more about the book Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold. Gold also wrote Memories of Anne Frank about Anne Frank's childhood friend Hannah Goslar and A Special Fateabout Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust.
Also explore:
How did the Holocaust-which murdered six million Jews and stripped millions more of their livelihoods, their families, and even their names-happen in plain sight? Learn more about the history and how Jews continue to fight anti-Semitism.

Visit natgeo.com/JewishAmerican for more National Geographic stories throughout Jewish American Heritage Month.

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Episode 18: How Anne Frank's diary survived

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Most people have heard the name Anne Frank, and many have read her diary, which details her and her family's time spent in hiding during the German occupation of Amsterdam in World War II. Less known are Miep and Jan Gies, two people who helped shelter the Frank family and preserved Anne Frank's diary after she was captured.

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Take a look around and explore the Secret Annex where Anne Frank was in hiding for more than two years during World War II, and where she wrote her diary.

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'Either We Go or We Burn Right Here': A Survivor Remembers the Warsaw Ghetto

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Sonia Klein was a teenager in hiding during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. This is her story.

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A little over half of the Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem are women. While many of them acted in cooperation with other family members, some of these courageous women were the initiators of the rescue and acted independently to save Jews. Here are some of their stories.

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Stories of Women Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust - Righteous Among the Nations - Yad Vashem

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A little over half of the Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem are women. While many of them acted in cooperation with other family members, some of these courageous women were the initiators of the rescue and acted independently to save Jews. Here are some of their stories.

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Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 with the stated intention of preventing espionage on American shores.

Military zones were created in California, Washington and Oregon-states with a large population of Japanese Americans. Then Roosevelt's executive order forcibly removed Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Executive Order 9066 affected the lives about 120,000 people-the majority of whom were American citizens.

Canada soon followed suit, forcibly removing 21,000 of its residents of Japanese descent from its west coast. Mexico enacted its own version, and eventually 2,264 more people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the United States.

Anti-Japanese American Activity

Weeks before the order, the Navy removed citizens of Japanese descent from Terminal Island near the Port of Los Angeles.

On December 7, 1941, just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese American community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets.

In January, the arrestees were transferred to prison camps in Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota, many unable to inform their families and most remaining for the duration of the war.

Concurrently, the FBI searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese American residents on the West Coast, seizing items considered contraband.

One-third of Hawaii's population was of Japanese descent. In a panic, some politicians called for their mass incarceration. Japanese-owned fishing boats were impounded.

Some Japanese American residents were arrested and 1,500 people-one percent of the Japanese population in Hawaii-were sent to prison camps on the U.S. mainland.

Photos of Japanese American Relocation and Incarceration

John DeWitt

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, leader of the Western Defense Command, believed that the civilian population needed to be taken control of to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

To argue his case, DeWitt prepared a report filled with known falsehoods, such as examples of sabotage that were later revealed to be the result of cattle damaging power lines.

DeWitt suggested the creation of the military zones and Japanese detainment to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle. His original plan included Italians and Germans, though the idea of rounding-up Americans of European descent was not as popular.

At Congressional hearings in February 1942, a majority of the testimonies, including those from California Governor Culbert L. Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren, declared that all Japanese should be removed.

Biddle pleaded with the president that mass incarceration of citizens was not required, preferring smaller, more targeted security measures. Regardless, Roosevelt signed the order.

War Relocation Authority

After much organizational chaos, about 15,000 Japanese Americans willingly moved out of prohibited areas. Inland state citizens were not keen for new Japanese American residents, and they were met with racist resistance.

Ten state governors voiced opposition, fearing the Japanese Americans might never leave, and demanded they be locked up if the states were forced to accept them.

A civilian organization called the War Relocation Authority was set up in March 1942 to administer the plan, with Milton S. Eisenhower from the Department of Agriculture to lead it. Eisenhower only lasted until June 1942, resigning in protest over what he characterized as incarcerating innocent citizens.

Relocation to 'Assembly Centers'

Army-directed removals began on March 24. People had six days notice to dispose of their belongings other than what they could carry.

Anyone who was at least 1/16th Japanese was evacuated, including 17,000 children under age 10, as well as several thousand elderly and disabled residents.

Japanese Americans reported to "Assembly Centers" near their homes. From there they were transported to a "Relocation Center" where they might live for months before transfer to a permanent "Wartime Residence."

Assembly Centers were located in remote areas, often reconfigured fairgrounds and racetracks featuring buildings not meant for human habitation, like horse stalls or cow sheds, that had been converted for that purpose. In Portland, Oregon, 3,000 people stayed in the livestock pavilion of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Facilities.

The Santa Anita Assembly Center, just several miles northeast of Los Angeles, was a de-facto city with 18,000 incarcerated, 8,500 of whom lived in stables. Food shortages and substandard sanitation were prevalent in these facilities.

Life in 'Assembly Centers'

Assembly Centers offered work to prisoners with the policy that they should not be paid more than an Army private. Jobs ranged from doctors to teachers to laborers and mechanics. A couple were the sites of camouflage net factories, which provided work.

Over 1,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans were sent to other states to do seasonal farm work. Over 4,000 of the incarcerated population were allowed to leave to attend college.

Conditions in 'Relocation Centers'

There were a total of 10 prison camps, called "Relocation Centers." Typically the camps included some form of barracks with communal eating areas. Several families were housed together. Residents who were labeled as dissidents were forced to a special prison camp in Tule Lake, California.

Two prison camps in Arizona were located on Native American reservations, despite the protests of tribal councils, who were overruled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Each Relocation Center was its own "town," and included schools, post offices and work facilities, as well as farmland for growing food and keeping livestock. Each prison camp "town" was completely surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

Net factories offered work at several Relocation Centers. One housed a naval ship model factory. There were also factories in different Relocation Centers that manufactured items for use in other prison camps, including garments, mattresses and cabinets. Several housed agricultural processing plants.

Violence in Prison Camps

Violence occasionally occurred in the prison camps. In Lordsburg, New Mexico, prisoners were delivered by trains and forced to march two miles at night to the camp. On July 27, 1942, during a night march, two Japanese Americans, Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura, were shot and killed by a sentry who claimed they were attempting to escape. Japanese Americans testified later that the two elderly men were disabled and had been struggling during the march to Lordsburg. The sentry was found not guilty by the army court martial board.

On August 4, 1942, a riot broke out in the Santa Anita Assembly Center, the result of anger about insufficient rations and overcrowding. At California's Manzanar War Relocation Center, tensions resulted in the beating of Fred Tayama, a Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL) leader, by six men. JACL members were believed to be supporters of the prison camp's administration.

Fearing a riot, police tear-gassed crowds that had gathered at the police station to demand the release of Harry Ueno. Ueno had been arrested for allegedly assaulting Tayama. James Ito was killed instantly and several others were wounded. Among those injured was Jim Kanegawa, 21, who died of complications five days later.

At the Topaz Relocation Center, 63-year-old prisoner James Hatsuki Wakasa was shot and killed by military police after walking near the perimeter fence. Two months later, a couple was shot at for strolling near the fence.

In October 1943, the Army deployed tanks and soldiers to Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California to crack down on protests. Japanese American prisoners at Tule Lake had been striking over food shortages and unsafe conditions that had led to an accidental death in October 1943. At the same camp, on May 24, 1943, James Okamoto, a 30-year-old prisoner who drove a construction truck, was shot and killed by a guard.

Fred Korematsu

In 1942, 23-year-old Japanese-American Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to a Japanese prison camp. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued in Korematsu v. United States that Executive Order 9066 violated the Fifth Amendment.

Korematsu lost the case, but he went on to become a civil rights activist and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. With the creation of California's Fred Korematsu Day, the United States saw its first U.S. holiday named for an Asian American. But it took another Supreme Court decision to halt the incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Mitsuye Endo

The prison camps ended in 1945 following the Supreme Court decision, Ex parte Mitsuye Endo. In this case, justices ruled unanimously that the War Relocation Authority "has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure."

The case was brought on behalf of Mitsuye Endo, the daughter of Japanese immigrants from Sacramento, California. After filing a habeas corpus petition, the government offered to free her, but Endo refused, wanting her case to address the entire issue of Japanese incarceration.

One year later, the Supreme Court made the decision, but gave President Truman the chance to begin camp closures before the announcement. One day after Truman made his announcement, the Supreme Court revealed its decision.

Reparations

The last Japanese internment camp closed in March 1946. President Gerald Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066 in 1976, and in 1988, Congress issued a formal apology and passed the Civil Liberties Act awarding $20,000 each to over 80,000 Japanese Americans as reparations for their treatment.

Sources

Japanese Relocation During World War II. National Archives.
Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord and R. Lord.
Lordsburg Internment POW Camp. Historical Society of New Mexico.
Smithsonian Institute.

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Japanese Internment Camps: WWII, Life & Conditions | HISTORY

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Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, be incarcerated.

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In the aftermath of World War I, Germans struggled to understand their country's uncertain future. Citizens faced poor economic conditions, skyrocketing unemployment, political instability, and profound social change. While downplaying more extreme goals, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party offered simple solutions to Germany's problems, exploiting people's fears, frustrations, and hopes to win broad support.

Discussion Question

How did conditions in Germany and Europe at the end of World War I contribute to the rise and triumph of Nazism in Germany?

Transcript

NARRATOR:
Paris, 1900. More than fifty million people from around the world visited the Universal Exposition-a world's fair intended to promote greater understanding and tolerance among nations, and to celebrate the new century, new inventions, exciting progress. The 20th century began much like our own-with hope that education, science and technology could create a better, more peaceful world. What followed soon after were two devastating wars.

TEXT ON SCREEN:
The Path to Nazi Genocide

NARRATOR:
The first "world war," from 1914 to 1918, was fought throughout Europe and beyond. It became known as "the war to end all wars." It cast an immense shadow on tens of millions of people. "This is not war," one wounded soldier wrote home. "It is the ending of the world." Half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at war's outbreak were dead when it was over. More than one third of all German men aged 19 to 22 were killed. Millions of veterans were crippled in body and in spirit. Advances in the technology of killing included the use of poison gas. Under the pressure of unending carnage, governments toppled and great empires dissolved. It was a cataclysm that darkened the world's view of humanity and its future. Winston Churchill said the war left "a crippled, broken world."

TEXT ON SCREEN:
Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Nazism, 1918-1933

NARRATOR:
The humiliation of Germany's defeat and the peace settlement that followed in 1919 would play an important role in the rise of Nazism and the coming of a second "world war" just 20 years later. What shocked so many in Germany about the treaty signed near Paris, at the Palace of Versailles, was that the victors dictated a future in which Germany was deprived of any significant military power. Germany's territory was reduced by 13%. Germany was forced to accept full responsibility for starting the war and to pay heavy reparations. To many, including 30-year old former army corporal Adolf Hitler, it seemed the country had been "stabbed in the back"-betrayed by subversives at home and by the government who accepted the armistice. In fact, the German military had quietly sought an end to the war it could no longer win in 1918. "It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain," Adolf Hitler later wrote. "We demand vengeance!"

Many veterans and other citizens struggled to understand Germany's defeat and the uncertain future. Troops left the bloody battlefields and returned to a bewildering society. A new and unfamiliar democratic form of government-the Weimar Republic-replaced the authoritarian empire and immediately faced daunting challenges. Thousands of Germans waited in lines for work and food in the early 1920s. Middle class savings were wiped out as severe inflation left the currency worthless. Some burned it for fuel. Economic conditions stabilized for a few years, then the worldwide depression hit in 1929. The German banking system collapsed, and by 1930 unemployment skyrocketed to 22%. In a country plagued by joblessness, embittered by loss of territory, and demoralized by ineffective government, political demonstrations frequently turned violent. Many political parties had their own paramilitary units to attack opponents and intimidate voters. In 1932, ninety-nine people were killed in the streets in one month. Right-wing propaganda and demonstrations played on fears of a Communist revolution spreading from the Soviet Union.

New social problems emerged from the impact of rapid industrialization and the growth of cities. Standards of behavior were changing. Crime was on the rise. Sexual norms were in flux. For the first time, women were working outside the home in large numbers, and the new constitution gave women the right to vote. Germany's fledgling democracy was profoundly tested by the crumbling of old values and fears of what might come next. Adolf Hitler had been undisputed leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party-known as Nazis-since 1921. In 1923, he was imprisoned for trying to overthrow the government. His trial brought him fame and followers. He used the jail time to dictate his political ideas in a book, Mein Kampf-My Struggle. Hitler's ideological goals included territorial expansion, consolidation of a racially pure state, and elimination of the European Jews and other perceived enemies of Germany. He served only a short jail sentence, and after the ban was lifted on his National Socialist Party, Hitler and his followers rejoined the battle in the streets and in the countryside.

The Nazi Party recruited, organized, and produced a newspaper to spread its message. While downplaying more extreme Nazi goals, they offered simple solutions to Germany's problems, exploiting people's fears, frustrations, and hopes. In the early 1930s, the frequency of elections was dizzying. So was the number of parties and splinter groups vying for votes. Hitler proved to be a charismatic campaigner and used the latest technology to reach people. The Nazi Party gained broad support, including many in the middle class-intellectuals, civil servants, students, professionals, shopkeepers and clerks ruined by the Depression. But the Nazis never received more than 38% of the vote in a free national election. No party was able to win a clear majority, and without political consensus, successive governments could not effectively govern the nation.

Adolf Hitler was not elected to office and he did not have to seize power. He was offered a deal just as the Nazis started to lose votes. In January 1933, when the old war hero, President Paul von Hindenburg, invited Hitler to serve as Chancellor in a coalition government, the Nazis could hardly believe their luck. The Nazis were revolutionaries who wanted to radically transform Germany. The conservative politicians in the new Cabinet didn't like or trust Hitler, but they liked democracy even less, and they saw the leftist parties as a bigger threat. They reached out to the Nazis to help build a majority in Parliament. They were confident they could control Hitler. One month later, when arson gutted the German parliament building, Hitler and his nationalist coalition partners seized their chance. Exploiting widespread fears of a communist uprising, they blamed Communists for the fire, and declared emergency rule. President Hindenburg signed a decree that suspended all basic civil rights and constitutional protections, providing the basis for arbitrary police actions.

The new government's first targets were political opponents. Under the emergency decree, they could be terrorized, beaten and held indefinitely. Leaders of trade unions and opposition parties were arrested. German authorities sent thousands, including leftist members of Parliament, to newly established concentration camps. Despite Nazi terror and brutal suppression of their opponents, many German citizens willingly accepted or actively supported these extreme measures in favor of order and security. Many Germans felt a new hope and confidence in the future of their country with the prospect of a bold, young charismatic leader. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels planned to win over those who were still unconvinced.

GOEBBELS [speaking German]:
One must govern well, and for good government one must also practice good propaganda. They work together. A good government without propaganda is not more possible than good propaganda without a good government.

NARRATOR:
Hitler spoke to the SA, his army of storm troopers.

HITLER [speaking German]:
Germany has awakened! We have won power in Germany. Now we must win the German people.

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Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Nazism, 1918-1933 - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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In the aftermath of World War I, Germans struggled to understand their country's uncertain future. Citizens faced poor economic conditions, skyrocketing unemployment, political instability, and profound social change. While downplaying more extreme goals, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party offered simple solutions to Germany's problems, exploiting people's fears, frustrations, and hopes to win broad support.

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In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million.

Eastern Europe

The majority of Jews in prewar Europe resided in eastern Europe. The largest Jewish communities in this area were in Poland, with about 3,000,000 Jews (9.5%); the European part of the Soviet Union, with 2,525,000 (3.4%); and Romania, with 756,000 (4.2%). The Jewish population in the three Baltic states totaled 255,000: 95,600 in Latvia, 155,000 in Lithuania, and 4,560 in Estonia. Here, Jews comprised 4.9%, 7.6%, and 0.4% of each country's population, respectively, and 5% of the region's total population.

Central Europe

In prewar central Europe, the largest Jewish community was in Germany, with about 525,000 members (0.75% of the total German population). This was followed by Hungary with 445,000 (5.1%), Czechoslovakia with 357,000 (2.4%), and Austria with 191,000, most of whom resided in the capital city of Vienna (2.8%).

Western Europe

In western Europe the largest Jewish communities were in Great Britain, with 300,000 Jews (0.65%); France, with 250,000 (0.6%); and the Netherlands, with 156,000 (1.8%). Additionally, 60,000 Jews (0.7%) lived in Belgium, 4,000 (0.02%) in Spain, and 1,200 (0.02%) in Portugal. Close to 16,000 Jews lived in Scandinavia, including 6,700 (0.11%) in Sweden, 5,700 (0.15%) in Denmark, 1,800 (0.05%) in Finland, and 1,400 (0.05%) in Norway.

Southern Europe

In southern Europe, Greece had the largest Jewish population, with about 73,000 Jews (1.2%). There were also significant Jewish communities in Yugoslavia (68,000, or 0.49%), Italy (48,000, or 0.11%), and Bulgaria (48,500, or 0.8%). 200 Jews (0.02%) lived in Albania.

Jewish Communities before the Nazi Seizure of Power

Before the Nazis seized power in 1933, Europe had a richly diverse set of Jewish cultures. Many of these cultures were dynamic and highly developed. They drew from hundreds and, in some areas, a thousand or more years of Jewish life on the continent. The diverse nature of individual Jewish communities in occupations, religious practices, involvement and integration in regional and national life, and other areas made for fruitful and varied Jewish life across Europe. In many countries, Jews stood as cultural and political luminaries, and had marched alongside non-Jews in World War I.

In little more than a decade, most of Europe would be conquered, occupied, or annexed by Nazi Germany and its Axis partners, and the majority of European Jews-two out of every three-would be dead.

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

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Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country

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In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million. The majority of Jews in prewar Europe resided in eastern Europe.

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In this intimate, living-history project, AZPM presents 19 first-person accounts of the Holocaust from survivors living in Southern Arizona.

Children of the Holocaust: Stories of Survival is a local public television program presented by AZPM.

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Children of the Holocaust: Stories of Survival | PBS

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Skip to Main Content Southern Arizona Holocaust survivors share their stories in their own words. More More In this intimate, living-history project, AZPM presents 19 first-person accounts of the Holocaust from survivors living in Southern Arizona. Children of the Holocaust: Stories of Survival is a local public television program presented by AZPM.

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Birkenau Entrance ©USHMM, courtesy of bpk-Bildagentur
Ejszyszki ©USHMM, courtesy of The Shtetl Foundation
Neighbors Watch Synagogue Burn ©USHMM, courtesy of Trudy Isenberg; Vandalized Business ©National Archives and Records Administration; Buchenwald ©USHMM, courtesy of Robert A. Schmuhl
Warsaw Ghetto, ©Bundesarchiv (Bild 101I/134/734/16A); Lodz Ghetto, ©Bundesarchiv (Bild 101I/133/703/20); Milkcan/A Desperate Plea ©USHMM, courtesy of Zydowski Instytut Historyczny imienia Emanuela Ringelbluma
Slovakian Deportation ©USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo and Film Archives; "Work Will Set You Free" ©USHMM, courtesy of Panstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oswiecimiu
Women on Bunks @USHMM, courtesy of Unknown Russian archive; Birkenau Barracks ©USHMM, courtesy of Mark Chrzanowski; Hungarian Jewish Women @USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem (Public Domain); Bowl, ©USHMM
"Extermination Through Work" @USHMM, courtesy of Archiv der KZ-
Gedenkstaette Mauthausen

USHMM=US Holocaust Memorial Museum

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The Holocaust: History and Memory - Google Arts & Culture

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Explore the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a living memorial that encourages visitors to remember, reflect, and act to confront hate and promote human dignity. In this virtual tour you will examine how the museum preserves and presents Holocaust history

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[Narrator] Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis killed about six million Jews and millions of other civilians throughout Europe.

These are some who were slaughtered in the Holocaust-a generation lost forever.

[Text on screen] EUROPEAN ANTISEMITISM FROM ITS ORIGINS TO THE HOLOCAUST

[Narrator] Jews are the people of the Hebrew Bible who lived in a land now known as Israel. They believe that there is only one God.

Christianity emerged from Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew who preached a singular religious message. The first Christians were Jews who prayed in Hebrew and observed the customs and religious rituals of Judaism. The Last Supper was a Jewish religious meal, probably at Passover.

Jesus was put to death at the hands of Roman authorities under Pontius Pilate in Judea, but the gospel accounts were interpreted as blaming all Jews for the crucifixion. To his followers, Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah. His death, sacrificial atonement. Most Jews believed the Messiah had not yet come. Redemption was not at hand.

Soon after the crucifixion, Roman armies destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Jews were exiled and scattered-to live as a dispersed minority. By the 5th century, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire.

The early Christian church portrayed Jews as unwilling to accept the word of God; illuminations showed Satan binding the eyes of the Jews. Some church leaders intensified the charge-condemning Jews as agents of the devil and murderers of God. The accusation was not renounced until the 1960s when the Second Vatican Council officially repudiated the ancient charge that Jews had murdered Christ.

For centuries, state and Church laws restricted Jews, preventing them from owning land and holding public office. Guilds excluded Jews from most occupations, forcing them into pursuits like money-lending, trade, commerce. Excluded from Christian society, Jews maintained their religious and social customs.

In 1095, Pope Urban II called for the liberation of Jerusalem. Christian crusaders set off to free the Holy Land from the Muslims. On the way, they slaughtered thousands of Jews.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians persecuted Jews. Portrayed as alien, Jews were regarded as usurers. It was said Jews poisoned the wells of Europe, causing the Black Plague. Illustrations depicted Jews as the devil, with horns and cloven feet, and showed them using the blood of Christian children in ritual sacrifices. These lies came to be taken as truth.

But where they were needed, Jews were tolerated. When they were allowed to participate in the larger society, Jews thrived.

In many places, secular and religious states forced Jews into segregated districts later called ghettos. England, France, Spain, Portugal, and many German states expelled masses of Jews-most of whom migrated eastward taking with them their religious convictions and traditions.

In 1517, Martin Luther attacked the Pope and corruption within his own Roman Catholic Church, beginning the Protestant Reformation. The young Luther hoped that tolerance would persuade Jews to convert. But when Jews adhered to their own religious beliefs and refused to join his new reformed church, Luther's disappointment turned to hatred.
What then shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? . . .Their synagogues . . .should be set on fire, and what does not burn must be covered over with earth so that no man will ever see stone or cinder of them again. . . .Their houses also should be razed and destroyed. . . . All their prayer books. . .should be taken from them.
The Protestant Reformation brought no end to the anti-Jewish tradition of Christianity.

With the 18th century Enlightenment's emphasis on reason, the domination of the Church diminished. Some Enlightenment thinkers called for full rights for Jews, but only on the condition that they discard their religious customs. Others blamed Judaism as the source of irrational religious faith.

Even though many Jews assimilated socially and culturally, prejudice did not disappear.

In France in 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish member of the French Army's general staff, was convicted of passing military secrets to Germany. Later, proof of forgery confirmed his innocence, but Dreyfus remained the victim of a cover up to divert attention from army corruption. A century after the French Revolution proclaimed Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, giving Jews their freedom, frenzied mobs in the streets of Paris chanted Death to the Jews.

[Text on screen] It is not a question of religion. The enemy is JUDAISM!

[Narrator] Religious discrimination had gradually changed into a thriving secular, political, and social antisemitism.

Nevertheless, freed from some restrictions, many Jews entered the Christian World and became prominent citizens.

Then, around 1900, a new lie was promoted: that Jews conspired to dominate the world using their money and intelligence to manipulate trusting Christians. Russian secret police forged a document to support the story of a take-over plot supposedly authored by a conference of Jewish leaders. A proven forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was nevertheless translated into every major language and distributed worldwide. It is circulated even today despite indisputable proof that it is a fake.

To divert popular discontent at appalling living conditions and autocratic control, Russian authorities encouraged antisemitic violence. Jews were blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. Pogroms, murderous rampages against Jews, erupted in Russia many times during the next three decades.

The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of yet another kind of antisemitism. At its core was the theory that Jews were not merely a religious group but a separate "race"-Semites-set apart because of genetically inherited characteristics.

Antisemites believed racial characteristics could not be overcome by assimilation or even conversion. Jews were said to be dangerous and threatening because of their "Jewish blood." Antisemitic racism united pseudoscientific theories with centuries old anti-Jewish stereotypes. These ideas gained wide acceptance.

The devastation of World War I, the demeaning peace of Versailles, the hyperinflation of the 1920s, and the depression of 1929 fueled mass discontent.

The presence of Jews in German cultural, economic, and political life made them convenient scapegoats for Germany's misfortunes.

Enter: Adolf Hitler. Hitler viewed world history as a racial struggle for survival of the fittest. He saw Jews as the source of all evil: disease, social injustice, cultural decline, capitalism and all forms of Marxism, especially Communism.

Antisemitism would become the predominant ideology of the Third Reich.

Nazi racism victimized many groups of people, but it was against the Jews that the Nazi state mobilized all its resources for terror.

After the Nazi takeover of power, anti-Jewish measures were put into effect one after another: Jewish businesses were boycotted, then seized. Jews were defined, separated from non-Jews. Jews were excluded from professions and studies. Jewish children were barred from schools. Jews were subjected to public humiliation.

The changes-whether gradual or sudden-were incomprehensible. Few could imagine what would happen. Even Jews.

The Nazis took antisemitism to an unprecedented level of violence. Genocide: the systematic murder of millions of people deemed inferior. Six million Jews. These are some of them.

[Text on screen] In the aftermath of the Holocaust, some Christian churches, including the Roman Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have re-examined their teachings on the Jews and Judaism.

Many denominations are continuing to address the role played by centuries of Christian antisemitism in contributing to circumstances that made the Holocaust possible.

Antisemitism did not end with the Holocaust and persists in Europe, the United States, and around the world today. Efforts to minimize, deny, or even celebrate the Holocaust are among the many ways antisemitism endures.

Hatred of Jews is fueled by myths, lies, and conspiracy theories. Some advocates of religious, political, and racial ideologies continue to exploit the hatred of Jews to achieve their own ends.

As the Holocaust demonstrates, antisemitism often appears alongside other forms of hatred, with potentially devastating consequences for individuals, communities, and nations.

Learn more at ushmm.org/antisemitism.

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Why the Jews: History of Antisemitism - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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This 13-minute film explains the history of antisemitism from the days of the early Christian church until the 20th century.

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Nazi Propaganda and Censorship The Nazis wanted Germans to support the Nazi dictatorship and believe in Nazi ideas. To accomplish this goal, they tried to control forms of communication through censorship and propaganda. This included control of newspapers, magazines, books, art, theater, music, movies, and radio.

How did the Nazis use censorship?

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Through decrees and laws, the Nazis abolished these civil rights and destroyed German democracy. Starting in 1934, it was illegal to criticize the Nazi government. Even telling a joke about Hitler was considered treachery. People in Nazi Germany could not say or write whatever they wanted.

Examples of censorship under the Nazis included:

Closing down or taking over anti-Nazi newspapers;

Controlling what news appeared in newspapers, on the radio, and in newsreels;

Banning and burning books that the Nazis categorized as un-German;

Controlling what soldiers wrote home during World War II.

How did the Nazis use propaganda?

The Nazis used propaganda to promote their ideas and beliefs. Beginning in March 1933, the regime tried to centralize its propaganda efforts in a new ministry led by Joseph Goebbels. This ministry was called the Reich Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda.

The Nazis used a variety of propaganda tools to spread Nazi ideas. Examples of propaganda under the Nazis included:

Glorifying Adolf Hitler by using his image on postcards, posters, and in the press;

Spreading negative images and ideas about Jews in magazines, films, cartoons, and other media;

Making radios more affordable so that more Germans could listen to Nazi ideas and news;

Broadcasting Nazi speeches on the radio and public loudspeakers;

Organizing large and celebratory Nazi Party rallies;

Creating groups, like the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, that fostered Nazi ideals.

How did propaganda and censorship work together?

Textbooks are a good example of how propaganda and censorship worked together in the Nazi regime. The Nazis used both propaganda and censorship to control what students read in school. Nazi censors removed some textbooks from classrooms. New textbooks taught students to obey the Nazi Party, love Hitler, and hate Jews.

Key Dates

During the spring of 1933, Nazi university student organizations, professors, and librarians put together long lists of books they think are un-German. These lists include books written by Jewish authors. They also include books by non-Jewish authors whose ideas conflict with Nazi ideals. On the night of May 10, 1933, Nazis hold book burnings. They march by torchlight in nighttime parades, sing chants, and throw books into huge bonfires. On that night more than 25,000 books are burned.
March 28, 1935
Premiere of the Propaganda Film September 1939
Banning Germans from Listening to Foreign Radio Triumph of the Will
Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film Triumph of the Will premieres in Berlin. The film shows footage taken at the 1934 Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg. The footage from the rally shows smiling children, cheering crowds, and uniformed Nazis. It features military parades and a speech by Adolf Hitler. Triumph of the Will will become one of the most infamous Nazi propaganda films.

World War II begins on September 1, 1939. Shortly afterwards, the Nazi regime makes listening to foreign radio broadcasts illegal. This is an attempt to control what information Germans hear about the war. The Nazi regime sees news and information from outside Germany as a security threat. They are worried about foreign radio broadcasts, which some Germans can access on their home radios. Later in the war, the regime even sentences people to death for listening to foreign radio stations.

Last Edited: Jan 15, 2021

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Nazi Propaganda and Censorship The Nazis wanted Germans to support the Nazi dictatorship and believe in Nazi ideas. To accomplish this goal, they tried to control forms of communication through censorship and propaganda. This included control of newspapers, magazines, books, art, theater, music, movies, and radio.

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When the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz death camp 70 years ago many of the prisoners had been killed or marched away by the retreating Nazis. But among those left were some twin children - the subject of disturbing experiments by Dr Josef Mengele.

Vera Kriegel and her twin sister Olga were just five years old when they were taken from their village in Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz.

Transported in cattle cars which were so tightly packed that the dead were still standing, she recalls the "sheer terror" of arriving at the camp and treading on "dead people like steps" as she left the train.

New arrivals at the camp were sorted into the weak, who would be gassed straight away, and the strong, who would be made to work. But Mengele and his assistants were there too, looking for twins.

Vera, her sister, and her mother were taken straight to SS Captain Josef Mengele. He was intrigued, she says, by what he described as her mother's "perfect Aryan features" and blue eyes, while Vera's and her sister's were brown.

Mengele selected them for experimentation.

Another woman who remembers her arrival at the camp is Jona Laks, who was taken as a teenager from the Lodz ghetto. She was not immediately recognised as a twin and was initially sent off in the direction of the gas chamber - when her sister told Mengele they were twins he had her brought to his laboratory.

Josef Mengele was an assistant to a well-known researcher who studied twins at the Institute for Heredity Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt - he started working at Auschwitz in May 1943.

There he had an unlimited supply of twins to study, and he wouldn't get in trouble if they died.

According to Prof Paul Weindling of Oxford Brookes University, author of Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments, hundreds of children were used in Mengele's experiments.

"I found a record of a prisoner doctor and bacteriologist who was forced to work for Mengele that there were 732 pairs of twins," he says, and suggests the doctor was interested in genetics. "I think Mengele might have been interested in the inheritance of the propensity to having twins."

He believes many of the twins survived Auschwitz, although he thinks Roma twins were almost certainly killed.

Some of the children, now elderly, have little memory of the experiments, others have memories that may not be 100% accurate.

Jona Laks says Mengele removed organs from people without anaesthetic, and if one twin died the other would be murdered. Vera Kriegel says that he killed people with an injection to the heart, and then dissected them.

She remembers being ushered into his laboratory. "I was looking at a whole wall of human eyes. A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes. These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down on the floor."

The first experiment she was subjected to involved being kept in a small wooden cage with her sister and being given painful injections in her back - she doesn't know why, but thinks it may have been an attempt to change the colour of her eyes.

In another experiment, she says, the pair of them and more than 100 other twins were given injections of bacteria that cause Noma disease - an infection of the mouth or genitals, which causes boils and often turns gangrenous.

Some twins became feverish, and some died, she says. She also remembers Mengele reacting angrily when twins went missing - once when this had happened she stared him out to prove he could not completely dominate her.

As well as twins, Mengele experimented on dwarves, giants and Romas.

Moti Alon, who arrived in Auschwitz aged nine in 1944, remembers being forced to watch a dwarf and a Roma woman being made to have sex.

He remembers having a number tattooed on his arm. The same happened to his brother, though the tattooist made a mistake. "Instead of writing 17 they wrote 10 so they erased it and did some dots," he says.

For Menachem Bodner who arrived at the camp with his brother as a three -year-old, this number became his identity.

When he left the camp in 1945, he had no idea who he was.

With the help of Israeli genealogist Ayana KimRon and a Facebook page set up to help, he has recently discovered that his real name is Elias Gottesman and that he and his brother, named Jeno, were born in a small town east of Munkacs, then part of Hungary, now in Ukraine (and known as Mukacheve).

KimRon also discovered that his father had died in a camp and that his mother, Roza, had returned to Hungary following a death march from Flossenburg concentration camp - only then to be murdered in her home town in 1946 during an anti-Semitic riot.

Now aged 74, he continues to search for the twin brother he last saw when the camp was liberated in 1945.

On 26 January 1945, Vera Kriegel remembers, the guards "were in a big panic. So they poured petrol over the barracks and tried to destroy all the evidence."

Grabbing a big pack of family photos, Vera, her mother and sister, fled the camp, only to be caught and beaten and thrown back into the barracks.

The following day, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz. The soldiers, she says, "brought these striped coats and told us to put them on and roll up our sleeves, so we could show our numbers.

"They filmed us, the children. They wanted to know what happened to us [and] Mengele's experiments. Everything was written down."

As for Mengele, he fled West and was arrested by the US Army. But he had no SS blood group tattooed on his arm so he was released by a unit that was unaware that his name was on a list of major war criminals.

He worked as a farmhand in Bavaria before escaping to Argentina in 1949.

Though the West German authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in 1959, Mengele remained in South America before his death from drowning following a stroke at a holiday resort in Brazil in 1979. He was buried in Sao Paulo under the name Wolfgang Gerhard.

The children coped with the appalling ordeal of Auschwitz and Mengele's experiments in different ways.

Moti Alon, his mother and twin, eventually made their way back home, arriving in Budapest on 5 May 1945. He now lives in Israel. "I have no traumas, not from this," he says.

Vera Kriegel emigrated to Israel with her mother after the war, where she lives today. Seventy years later, she still has nightmares.

Jona Laks became an activist, the head of a group of Mengele twins. She has been back to Auschwitz many times, and says what she experienced there has never left her mind.

Menachem, the boy with no name, eventually returned to his home town in Ukraine.

"I told the driver to stop and got out of the car, and something was familiar to me, very familiar.

"I remembered the road, I remembered two Gestapo approaching or arriving from my right side... and then they come to my home."

Above all, he recalled his parents, carefree before the war and the Holocaust.

"It was noon. my mother wore a green skirt with white flowers... I remember her from the back, not the front.

Watch Newsnight's report on the twins of Auschwitz - or watch a longer report on BBC World News at 23:30 GMT on Friday 30 January.

Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

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When the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz death camp 70 years ago many of the prisoners had been killed or marched away by the retreating Nazis. But among those left were some twin children - the subject of disturbing experiments by Dr Josef Mengele.

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Reality Check: Former neo-Nazi leader explains what got him to leave the National Socialist Movement | CNN

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With a rise in antisemitic incidents and hate crimes, Reality Check's John Avlon speaks with former NSM leader Jeff Schoep about this increase in extremism and what led him to change his neo-Nazi beliefs.

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Video of Liberation of a Camp. Caution. Sensitive Material. 

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Video of Liberation of a Camp. Caution. Sensitive Material. 

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This film footage is excerpted from documentary film titled "Mauthausen Concentration Camp," showing footage from both Mauthausen and the nearby Gusen camp. Filmed by US cameramen, the footage opens with a broad view of buildings in the Gusen camp. Excerpts that follow show scenes in the camps, American care of the liberated prisoners, and Austrian civilians loading bodies of victims onto carts for burial.

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This film footage is excerpted from documentary film titled "Mauthausen Concentration Camp," showing footage from both Mauthausen and the nearby Gusen camp. Filmed by US cameramen, the footage opens with a broad view of buildings in the Gusen camp.

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The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, flanks both banks of the Vistula River. A city of 1.3 million inhabitants, Warsaw was the capital of the resurrected Polish state in 1919. Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Warsaw's prewar Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30 percent of the city's total population. The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, second only to New York City.

Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment. German troops entered Warsaw on September 29, shortly after its surrender.

Less than a week later, German officials ordered the establishment of a Jewish council ( Judenrat) under the leadership of a Jewish engineer named Adam Czerniaków. As chairman of the Jewish council, Czerniaków had to administer the soon-to-be established ghetto and to implement German orders. On November 23, 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations.

Warsaw Ghetto

On October 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.

Conditions in the Ghetto

The Jewish council offices were located on Grzybowska Street in the southern part of the ghetto. Jewish organizations inside the ghetto tried to meet the needs of the ghetto residents as they struggled to survive. Among the welfare organizations active in the ghetto were the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, the Federation of Associations in Poland for the Care of Orphans, and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training. Financed until late 1941 primarily by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, these organizations attempted to keep alive a population that suffered severely from starvation, exposure, and infectious disease.

The hunger in the ghetto was so great, was so bad, that people were laying on the streets and dying, little children went around begging...
- Abraham Lewent

Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life. In 1941 the average Jew in the ghetto subsisted on 1,125 calories a day. Czerniaków wrote in his diary entry for May 8, 1941: "Children starving to death." Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. Widespread smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto supplemented the miserable official allotments and kept the death rate from increasing still further.

Documenting Life in the Ghetto

Emanuel Ringelblum, a Warsaw-based historian prominent in Jewish self-aid efforts, founded a clandestine organization that aimed to provide an accurate record of events taking place in German-occupied Poland while the ghetto existed. This record came to be known as the "Oneg Shabbat" ("In Celebration of Sabbath," also known as the Ringelblum Archive). Only partly recovered after the war, the Ringelblum Archive remains an invaluable source about life in the ghetto and German policy toward the Jews of Poland.

Deportations and Uprising

From July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center. During this period, the Germans deported about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka; they killed approximately 35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation.

In January 1943, SS and police units returned to Warsaw, this time with the intent of deporting thousands of the remaining approximately 70,000-80,000 Jews in the ghetto to forced-labor camps for Jews in Lublin District of the Government General. This time, however, many of the Jews, understandably believing that the SS and police would deport them to the Treblinka killing center, resisted deportation, some of them using small arms smuggled into the ghetto. After seizing approximately 5,000 Jews, the SS and police units halted the operation and withdrew.

On April 19, 1943, a new SS and police force appeared outside the ghetto walls, intending to liquidate the ghetto and deport the remaining inhabitants to the forced labor camps in Lublin district. The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance in the first days of the operation, inflicting casualties on the well-armed and equipped SS and police units. They continued to resist deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks before the Germans ended the operation on May 16. The SS and police deported approximately 42,000 Warsaw ghetto survivors captured during the uprising to the forced-labor camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and to the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto, while the SS and police sent another 7,000 to the Treblinka killing center.

For months after the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, individual Jews continued to hide themselves in the ruins and, on occasion, attacked German police officials on patrol. Perhaps as many as 20,000 Warsaw Jews continued to live in hiding on the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw after the liquidation of the ghetto.

Liberation of Warsaw

On August 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa; AK), a non-Communist underground resistance army with units stationed throughout German-occupied Poland, rose against the German occupation authorities in an effort to liberate Warsaw. The impetus for the uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River. The Soviets failed to intervene; the Germans eventually crushed the revolt and razed the center of the city to the ground in October 1944. Though they treated captured Home Army combatants as prisoners of war, the Germans sent thousands of captured Polish civilians to concentration camps in the Reich. 166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the AK or had been discovered in hiding.

When Soviet troops resumed their offensive on January 17, 1945, they liberated a devastated Warsaw. According to Polish data, only about 174,000 people were left in the city, less than six per cent of the prewar population. Approximately 11,500 of the survivors were Jews.

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

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The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, flanks both banks of the Vistula River. A city of 1.3 million inhabitants, Warsaw was the capital of the resurrected Polish state in 1919. Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish life and culture in Poland.

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Irene Hizme describes medical experiments at Auschwitz

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Irene and Rene were born Renate and Rene Guttmann. The family moved to Prague shortly after the twins' birth, where they were living when the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. A few months later, uniformed Germans arrested their father.

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May is Jewish American Heritage Month! This month we reflect on the contributions made by the Jewish people to our country. From providing the world with life-changing scientific solutions to composing some of the best-known songs in the country, Jewish Americans have left an indelible mark on our country's history.

Learn about a few Jewish Americans who helped shape our country and/or culture on this week's blog:

1. Albert Einstein

Born in Wurttemberg, Germany in 1879 to a German Jewish family, Albert Einstein went on to become one of the world's most influential scientists. Einstein's theories went on to alter our understanding of the universe. He is credited for the creation of the Quantum Theory, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and the Unified Field Theory. As he became a world-renowned public figure, Einstein became increasingly political and spoke for Zionism and against militarism, which made him unpopular in his home country. Soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Einstein left the country. He later settled in Princeton, New Jersey where he would remain for the rest of his life. Albert Einstein died at the age of 76 in 1955. (Source: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/albert-einstein-born)

Learn more about Albert Einstein with these two videos:

Stream NOVA's episode Inside Einstein's Mind now with Passport at https://video.thinktv.org/video/nova-inside-einsteins-mind/.

2. Gloria Steinem

An acclaimed journalist, trailblazing feminist and one of the most passionate leaders of the women's rights movement in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. While Steinem does not believe in the religious aspect of Judaism, she recognizes it as a part of her heritage. She began her career as a journalist writing under a man's name but then went on to co-found the first feminist periodical with a national readership Ms. in 1971. Since then, she has gone on to co-found several other women's rights organizations, publish many books and involve herself with various political campaigns. (Source: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/steinem-gloria)

Learn more about Gloria Steinem:

3. Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin, was born Israel Isidore Beilin in Tyumen, Russia on May 11, 1888, and is known as one of the most enduring songwriters in American history, despite not knowing more than the basic principles of music composition. Over his career, Irving Berlin wrote more than 3,000 songs and produced 17 Hollywood film scores and 21 Broadway scores. He is best known for his hit song "White Christmas," which - until the release of Elton John's song "Candle in the Wind" 50 years later - was the recognized best-selling music single in any category. Within his life, Berlin went on to co-found the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), found his own music company and donate millions of dollars in royalties to organizations like the Army Emergency Relief, the Boy and Girl Scouts and more. (Source: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Irving_Berlin)

Learn more about Irving Berlin's impact:

4. Jerry Lewis

Born in 1926, Jerry Lewis went on to become one of the most popular actors and comedians of his time. He was born to a family of actors and he began his acting career at age 16. At the age of 20, he began working closely with singer Dean Martin and, by the late 1940s, they had both risen to national fame. Lewis went on to star or co-star in hit movies like At War with the Army, The Bellboy, The King of Comedy and more. By the end of his life, Jerry Lewis was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, a recipient of the United States Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service and had two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Throughout his life, Lewis also raised more than $2 billion dollars for his Muscular Dystrophy Association Charity, Jerry's Kids. He passed away in his Las Vegas home at the age of 91 in 2017. (Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jerry-lewis)

Learn more about Jerry Lewis' upbringing and early career on the PBS special When Comedy Goes to School:

5. Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor, born on February 27, 1932, was an Academy Award-winning British American actress who converted to Judaism in 1959 following the death of her third husband. Known for her roles in Father of the Bride, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Cleopatra, Elizabeth Burton was named seventh on the list of Female Legends created by the American Film Institutes. Throughout her life, Taylor traveled to Israel and helped to raise funds for the Jewish state during the Arab boycott in the 1970s. (Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/elizabeth-taylor)

Learn more about Elizabeth Taylor's life and legacy:

6. Mark Rothko

Jewish painter Mark Rothko was born on September 25, 1903, in Russia (current day Latvia). His work often concentrated on basic emotions and therefore much of his work does not contain any intense colors. Although he was respected by other artists of his time, his work remained relatively obscure until 1960 when he was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. In 1967, he contributed fourteen works of art to a church in Houston, Texas now known as "The Rothko Chapel." He passed away on February 25, 1970, but his work still lives on today in museums scattered across the U.S. (Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/mark-rothko)

Learn more about Mark Rothko's life and legacy by checking out the videos below:

You can also stream American Master's "Rothko: Pictures Must Be Miraculous" now with Passport: https://video.thinktv.org/video/rothko-pictures-must-be-miraculous-g9pslc/.

7. Stan Lee

Best known for his comics, Stan Lee was a Jewish American comic book writer, editor and publisher and was the former president and chairman of Marvel Comics. Lee created what fans refer to as the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and the X-Men. With Steve Ditko, he created Doctor Strange and Marvel's most-successful superhero, Spiderman. Lee received several awards for his work, including the National Medal of Arts, awarded to him on November 17, 2008. He also founded The Stan Lee Foundation in an effort to promote literacy and diversity in 2010 before his death on November 12, 2018. (Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/stan-lee)

Learn more about Stan Lee:

8. Elie Wiesel

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, award-winning novelist, journalist, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient who was born on September 30, 1928, in a Romanian Jewish village. In June of 1944, Wiesel and his family were sent to Auschwitz. His mother and sister perished in the camp while he and his father were sent to a forced labor camp. After being moved to another camp, Wiesel's father died due to starvation and exhaustion. Wiesel was liberated in 1945 and released his first novel, Night, in 1958, which told the story of the horrors of the Holocaust and depicted his struggle with faith. He then went on to write more novels about Jewish suffering. In 1993, Wiesel spoke at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. His words, which echo his life's work, are carved in stone at the entrance to the museum: "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness." Elie Wiesel passed away on July 2, 2016. (Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/elie-wiesel)

Learn more about the life and legacy of Elie Wiesel:

9. Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City. Sondheim went on to win eight Tony awards, an Academy award, eight Grammy awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement award and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Sondheim wrote lyrics and/or music for beloved musicals such as West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies and Into the Woods. His best-known song, "Send in the Clowns," has become a modern standard and has been covered by acts such as Barbara Streisand and Frank Sinatra. Sondheim passed away at the age of 91 on November 26, 2021. (Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/stephen-sondheim)

Learn more about the life and work of Stephen Sondheim:

10. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice, she became the second woman to sit on the court and the first female Jewish justice. She was born on March 15, 1933. In 1970, she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. Following a vacancy in the Supreme Court in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her for the seat. Throughout her career on the Supreme Court bench, Bader-Ginsburg became a pop culture icon due to her carefully-crafted and fiery dissents. On September 18, 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died after a battle with cancer. During a ceremony following the arrival of the casket, Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt said, "As a lawyer she won equality for women and men, not in one swift victory, but brick by brick case by case." The dissents Ginsburg made became so famous for they "were not cries of defeat," Holtzblatt said. "They were blueprints for the future." (Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ruth-bader-ginsburg)

Learn more about the life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

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10 Jewish Americans Who Changed History - ThinkTV

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May is Jewish American Heritage Month! This month we reflect on the contributions made by the Jewish people to our country. From providing the world with life-changing scientific solutions to composing some of the best-known songs in the country, Jewish Americans have left an indelible mark on our country's history.

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Faces of the Holocaust: The Upstander * Unpacked for Educators

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Meet Elsa Holzer, one of 200 non-Jewish women who led the only open protest against the Holocaust in German history. While most intermarried couples

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The term Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a euphemism used by Nazi Germany’s leaders. It referred to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

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Blanka was an only child in a close-knit family in Lodz, Poland. Her father died in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland, Blanka and her mother remained in Lodz with Blanka's grandmother, who was unable to travel. Along with other relatives, they were forced into the Lodz ghetto in 1940. There, Blanka worked in a bakery. She and her mother later worked in a hospital in the Lodz ghetto, where they remained until late 1944 when they were deported to the Ravensbrueck camp in Germany. From Ravensbrueck, Blanka and her mother were sent to a subcamp of Sachsenhausen. Blanka was forced to work in an airplane factory (Arado-Werke). Her mother was sent to another camp. Soviet forces liberated Blanka in spring 1945. Blanka, living in abandoned houses, made her way back to Lodz. She discovered that none of her relatives, including her mother, had survived. Blanka then moved westward to Berlin, eventually to a displaced persons camp. She immigrated to the United States in 1947.

Transcript

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Blanka Rothschild describes forced labor in the Ravensbrück camp

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Blanka was an only child in a close-knit family in Lodz, Poland. Her father died in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland, Blanka and her mother remained in Lodz with Blanka's grandmother, who was unable to travel. Along with other relatives, they were forced into the Lodz ghetto in 1940.

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Concentration Camp Footage.  Caution.  Sensitive Material

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Eichmann (1906-1962) was born in Solingen, Germany, on March 19, 1906. As a youth, he moved with his family to Linz, Austria. A poor student, he completed his basic schooling and began training in mechanical engineering. He did not finish his studies. In the uncertain economic times of the 1920s, he drifted from job to job as a day laborer, an office worker, and as a traveling salesman for Vacuum Oil Company, AG. In 1932, at the instigation of an acquaintance, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who would later serve as his superior in the Reich Security Main Office ( Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), Eichmann entered the Austrian National Socialist (Nazi) Party, and the SS.

In 1933, as Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists (Nazis) came to power in Germany, the Austrian government banned membership in the Austrian Nazi Party. Like many Austrian Nazis, Adolf Eichmann fled Austria for Bavaria. There in August 1933, Eichmann joined the "Austrian Legion," an association organized for Nazi Party members from Austria. There, he engaged in a few months' military training. In 1934, with the rank of SS- Scharführer (Sergeant) Eichmann joined the Security Service Main Office ( Sicherheitsdienst (SD)- Hauptamt). He still worked for this organization when it became part of the RSHA in 1939. In the mid-1930s, Eichmann worked for SD office II-112, which had among its objectives the surveillance of Jewish organizations. Assigned to a section dealing with Zionist activities, Eichmann negotiated with Zionist functionaries and made an inspection tour of Palestine in 1937. His efforts to promote a "Zionist emigration of Jews from Germany by all [available] means" would serve him well in preparing him for his future activities.

During the in March 1938, Eichmann personally led a raid on the Jewish Cultural Community offices. He then worked to organize a Central Office for Jewish Emigration ( Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Vienna, which opened officially on August 20, 1938. According to internal estimates, the Central Office "facilitated" the emigration of 110,000 Austrian Jews between August 1938 and June 1939. The Central Office was so successful in its forced emigration efforts that it created a template-often called the "Vienna Model"-or a Reich-wide Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration ( Reichzentrale für jüdische Auswanderung).

Eichmann led the Central Office beginning in October 1939. Here he met with less "success," particularly as deportation of Jews began to replace emigration as a strategy for a "Jew-free" Germany. In this area, Eichmann was ultimately to play a pivotal role. In the summer of 1939, Eichmann became responsible for promoting the expulsion of Czech Jews from the newly annexed Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and created a further Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, after the pattern of its Viennese counterpart.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Eichmann organized the first actual attempt at mass deportation from the Greater German Reich. He coordinated the deportation of some 3,500 Jews from Moravia and Vienna to Nisko on the San River, in that part of German-occupied Poland to be designated as the General Government ( Generalgouvernement). Although problems with the deportation effort and a change in German policy put an end to these deportations, Eichmann's superiors were sufficiently satisfied with his initiative to ensure that he would play a role in future deportation proceedings.

After the foundation of the RSHA in September 1939, Eichmann moved from the SD to the Gestapo and became director of RSHA section ( Referat) IV D 4 (Clearing Activities, or Räumungsangelegenheiten) (1940). After March 1941, he became director of section IV B 4 (Jewish Affairs, or Judenreferat).

In October 1940, Eichmann and the office IV D 4 organized the deportation of nearly 7,000 Jews from Baden and Saarpfalz to areas of unoccupied France. From his position in RSHA section IV B 4, however, Eichmann played his central role in the deportation of over 1.5 million Jews from all over Europe to killing centers and killing sites in occupied Poland and in parts of the occupied Soviet Union.

In the autumn of 1941, Eichmann, then an SS- Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and the chief of RSHA section IV B 4, took part in discussions in which the annihilation of the European Jews was planned. Since Eichmann was to be in charge of transporting Jews from all over Europe to the killing centers, RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich asked Eichmann to prepare a presentation for the Wannsee Conference. At the conference, RSHA officials advised the appropriate government and Nazi Party agencies on the implementation of the " Final Solution." Eichmann also relayed these plans to his network of officials who would help him to carry out deportation efforts in German-occupied areas and in Germany's Axis partners.

Prominent among these " Eichmann-Männer" ("Eichmann's men") were his deputy Rolf Günther, Alois Brunner, Theodor Dannecker, and Dieter Wisliceny. In 1942, Eichmann and his henchmen organized the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium. In 1943 and 1944 came the turn of the Jews of Greece, northern Italy, and Hungary. Only in Hungary did Eichmann involve himself directly on the ground in the deportation process. From late April 1944, six weeks after Germany occupied Hungary, until early July, Eichmann and his aides deported some 440,000 Hungarian Jews.

At war's end, Eichmann found himself in US custody, but escaped in 1946. In the end, he succeeded, with the help of Catholic Church officials, in fleeing to Argentina. There he lived under a number of aliases, most famously Ricardo Klement. In 1960, agents of the Israeli Security Service ( Mossad) abducted Eichmann and brought him to Israel to stand trial. The proceedings before a special district court in Jerusalem drew international attention, and historians roundly credit coverage of the trial (famously in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem) with awakening public interest in the Holocaust.

In December 1961, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people. He was hanged at midnight between May 31 and June 1, 1962. Jewish authorities cremated his remains and scattered his ashes in the sea beyond Israeli boundary waters.

Last Edited: Aug 30, 2018

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Eichmann (1906-1962) was born in Solingen, Germany, on March 19, 1906. As a youth, he moved with his family to Linz, Austria. A poor student, he completed his basic schooling and began training in mechanical engineering. He did not finish his studies.

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Rapper Meek Mill vows to 'spread the word' against antisemitism after Auschwitz visit | CNN Politics

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Some 10,000 people from all over the world gathered last week in Poland for the annual March of the Living, a 2-mile walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, where Nazis murdered over a million civilians -- mostly Jews -- during World War II.

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"To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss."

From April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Nearly two million people died under the rule of the fanatical Communist movement, which imposed a ruthless agenda of forced labor, thought control, and mass execution on Cambodia. The purported goal was to transform the Southeast Asian country into a classless agrarian utopia. The result was an ancient society's wholesale destruction and a horrifying new term for the world to confront: "the killing fields."

The Khmer Rouge began their reign with the murder of surrendering officials of the former government and the brutal emptying of the capital and other cities. Black-clad soldiers marched millions of people into the countryside and put them to work as slaves digging canals and tending crops. Religion, popular culture, and all forms of self-expression were forbidden. Families were split apart, with children forced into mobile labor brigades.

Anyone who questioned the new order risked torture and death by a blow to the head. Ethnic minorities faced particular persecution. Not even members of the Khmer Rouge were safe. The movement killed thousands of its own as suspected traitors and spies for foreign powers. In time, gross mismanagement of the economy led to shortages of food and medicine, and untold numbers of Cambodians succumbed to disease and starvation.

An invasion by neighboring Vietnam finally toppled the regime. But a new civil war began and almost three decades passed before any Khmer Rouge leaders were brought to justice. In 2006, the United Nations and the Cambodian government inaugurated a joint tribunal known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). So far it has convicted three defendants and sentenced them to lengthy prison terms.

The court functions not only to return verdicts but also to try to give some measure of peace and resolution to victims and to Cambodian society as a whole. Its proceedings are open to the public; victims can register as "civil parties" to question defendants during trial sessions and seek various types of reparations.

The court has drawn criticism for the high cost of operation and the low number of indictments. But whatever its flaws, it reflects a strengthening global consensus that, no matter how much time has passed, perpetrators of the modern era's worst crimes must be brought to account, in a framework that helps survivors repair their lives.

The Museum is grateful to the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, Kingdom of Cambodia; the Documentation Center of Cambodia; and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for their support and materials used in this case history.
This page was last updated in April 2018.

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"To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss." From April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Nearly two million people died under the rule of the fanatical Communist movement, which imposed a ruthless agenda of forced labor, thought control, and mass execution on Cambodia.

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I searched "children of Holocaust." But, you are able to search for other videos too.

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children of holocaust -- Search the Encyclopedia | Holocaust Encyclopedia

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Josef Mengele is one of the most infamous figures of the Holocaust. His service at Auschwitz and the medical experiments he conducted there have made him the most widely recognized perpetrator of the crimes committed at that camp. His postwar life in hiding has come to represent the international failure to bring the perpetrators of Nazi crimes to justice.

Because of his infamy, Mengele has been the subject of numerous popular books, films, and television shows. Many of these portrayals distort the real facts of Mengele's crimes and take him out of his historical context. Some portray him as a mad scientist who conducted sadistic experiments with no scientific basis.

The truth about Mengele is even more disturbing. He was a highly trained doctor and medical researcher, as well as a decorated war veteran. He was respected in his field and worked for one of the leading research institutions in Germany. Much of his medical research at Auschwitz supported the work of other German scientists. He was one of dozens of biomedical researchers who conducted experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. And he was one of a number of medical professionals who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Mengele acted within the norms of German science under the Nazi regime. His crimes represent the extreme danger posed by science when it is conducted in the service of an ideology that denies the rights, dignity, and even humanity of certain groups of people.

Mengele before Auschwitz

Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in the Bavarian city of Günzburg, Germany. He was the eldest son of Karl Mengele, a prosperous manufacturer of farming equipment.

Mengele studied medicine and physical anthropology at several universities. In 1935, he earned a PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Munich. In 1936, Mengele passed the state medical exams.

In 1937, Mengele began working at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, Germany. There, he was an assistant to the director, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer. Verschuer was a leading geneticist known for his research on twins. Under Verschuer's direction, Mengele completed an additional doctorate in 1938.

Embracing Nazi Ideology

Mengele did not actively support the Nazi Party before it came to power. However, in 1931, he joined the , the paramilitary of another right-wing party, the German National People's Party. Mengele became a member of the Nazi Stahlhelm SA when it absorbed the Stahlhelm in 1933, but he ceased actively participating in it in 1934.

During his university studies, however, Mengele embraced racial science, the false theory of biological racism. He believed that Germans were biologically different from and superior to members of all other races. Racial science was a fundamental tenet of Nazi ideology. Hitler used racial science to justify the forced sterilization of persons with certain physical or mental diseases or physical deformities. The Nuremberg Race Laws, which outlawed marriage between Germans and Jewish, Black, or Romani peoples, were also based upon racial science.

In 1938, Mengele joined the Nazi Party and the SS. In his work as a scientist, he sought to support the Nazi goal of maintaining and increasing the supposed superiority of the German "race." Mengele's employer and mentor, Verschuer, also embraced biological racism. In addition to conducting research, Verschuer and his staff - including Mengele - provided expert opinions to Nazi authorities who had to determine whether persons qualified as German under the Nuremberg Laws. Mengele and his colleagues also evaluated Germans whose physical or mental condition might qualify them to be forcibly sterilized or barred from marriage under German law.

Serving on the Eastern Front

In June 1940, Mengele was drafted into the German army ( At first, he worked for the Wehrmacht ). A month later, he volunteered for the medical service of the Waffen -SS (the military branch of the SS). SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) in German-occupied Poland. There, Mengele evaluated the criteria and methods used by the SS to determine whether persons claiming to be of German descent were racially and physically suitable to qualify as Germans.

Around the end of 1940, Mengele was assigned to the engineering battalion of the SS Division " " as a medical officer. For about 18 months beginning in June 1941, he saw extremely brutal fighting on the Wiking eastern front. In addition, in the first weeks of Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, Mengele's division slaughtered thousands of Jewish civilians. Mengele's service on the eastern front earned him the Iron Cross, both 2nd and 1st Class, and promotion to SS captain (SS- Hauptsturmführer ).

Mengele returned to Germany in January 1943. While awaiting his next Waffen - SS assignment, he began to work again for his mentor Verschuer. Verschuer had recently become the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin.

Assigned to Auschwitz

On May 30, 1943, the SS assigned Mengele to (literally, "Gypsy camp"). Beginning in 1943, nearly 21,000 Auschwitz. There is some evidence that Mengele himself requested this assignment. He worked as one of the camp physicians at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the Auschwitz camps and also served as a killing center for Jews deported from throughout Europe. In addition to other duties, Mengele had responsibility for Birkenau's Zigeunerlager Romani men, women, and children (pejoratively referred to as Zigeuner or "Gypsies") were sent to Auschwitz and imprisoned in the Zigeunerlager . When this family camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, Mengele participated in selecting the 2,893 Romani prisoners who were to be murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed chief physician for the part of the Auschwitz camp complex called Auschwitz-Birkenau or Auschwitz II. In November 1944, he was assigned to the Birkenau hospital for the SS.

"Angel of Death": Selecting Prisoners to be Murdered

As part of their camp duties, medical staff at Auschwitz performed so-called selections. The purpose of the selections was to identify persons who were unable to work. The SS considered such persons useless and therefore murdered them. When transports of Jews arrived at Birkenau, the camp medical personnel selected some of the able-bodied adults to perform forced labor in the concentration camp. Those not selected for labor, including children and older adults, were murdered in the gas chambers.

Camp physicians at Auschwitz and at other concentration camps also conducted periodic selections in the camp infirmaries and barracks. They conducted these selections in order to identify prisoners who were injured or had become too ill or weak to work. The SS used various methods to murder these prisoners, including lethal injections and gassing. Mengele routinely carried out such selections at Birkenau, leading some prisoners to refer to him as the "angel of death." Prisoner Gisella Perl, a Jewish gynecologist at Birkenau, later recalled how Mengele's appearance in the women's infirmary filled the prisoners with terror:

We feared these visits more than anything else, because [. . .] we never knew whether we would be permitted to live [. . . .] He was free to do whatever he pleased with us.

- Quoted according to Gisella Perl's memoir I was a Doctor in Auschwitz 1

After World War II, Mengele became infamous for his work at Auschwitz thanks to the accounts of prisoner physicians who had worked under him and of prisoners who had survived his medical experiments.

Mengele was one of some 50 physicians who served at Auschwitz. He was neither the highest ranking doctor in the Auschwitz camp complex nor the commander of the other doctors there. Nevertheless, his name is by far the best known of all the doctors who served at Auschwitz. One reason for this was Mengele's frequent presence on the ramp where selections took place. When Mengele did not himself perform selection duty, he often still appeared at the ramp, looking among the prisoners for twins for his experiments and physicians for the Birkenau infirmary. Consequently, many survivors who underwent selection upon arrival at Auschwitz assumed that Mengele was the doctor who had selected them. However, Mengele performed this task no more often than his colleagues.

Biomedical Researchers at Auschwitz

The SS authorized German biomedical researchers to conduct unethical and often lethal human experiments in the concentration camps. Auschwitz provided prisoners for human experiments conducted at various other camps. It also served as the site of a variety of human experiments. This is because of the number of prisoners sent there. The SS sent 1.3 million men, women, and children from many different national and ethnic backgrounds to Auschwitz. Researchers looking for human subjects who met specific criteria could more easily find them at Auschwitz than at other camps.

Mengele was one of more than a dozen SS medical personnel who conducted experiments on people imprisoned at Auschwitz. These doctors included:

Eduard Wirths, the head Auschwitz physician;

Carl Clauberg, a noted specialist in the treatment of infertility;

Horst Schumann, who gassed thousands of patients with disabilities during the Nazi Euthanasia Program;

SS physician Helmut Vetter, who conducted drug trials for the Bayer subsidiary of IG Farben on prisoners at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Gusen concentration camps;

Johann Paul Kremer, a professor of anatomy.

These doctors saw their appointment to Auschwitz as an exciting opportunity to advance their research.

Types of Experiments Conducted

The experiments in the concentration camps permanently maimed many victims or caused them to die. In some experiments, death was the intended outcome for the victims. The medical professionals who conducted experiments at Auschwitz did not seek the prisoners' consent or inform them of their treatment or possible effects. The types of experiments conducted at Auschwitz included:

Testing methods of mass sterilization;

Inflicting wounds on prisoners or infecting them with diseases to study the effects and test treatments;

Conducting unnecessary surgeries and procedures on patients for research purposes or to train medical professionals;

Murdering and dissecting prisoners for anthropological and medical research.

Mengele's Experiments at Auschwitz

Separate from his regular duties at Auschwitz, Mengele conducted research and experiments on prisoners. His mentor Verschuer may even have arranged Mengele's assignment to Auschwitz for the purpose of supporting the research of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A). Throughout his time at Auschwitz, Mengele sent his colleagues in Germany blood, body parts, organs, skeletons, and fetuses. These were all taken from Auschwitz prisoners. Mengele collaborated on his colleagues' research projects by conducting studies and experiments for them using prisoners.

In addition to his work with the KWI-A, Mengele also conducted his own experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. He hoped to publish the results and thereby gain the credentials to qualify for a university professorship.

In the course of his service at Auschwitz, Mengele organized a research complex located in a number of barracks. He chose his staff from among the prisoners who were medical professionals. Mengele was able to obtain up-to-date instruments and equipment for his research and even set up a pathology lab.

Research Goals

Mengele's own research and the research he conducted for the KWI-A generally focused on how genes develop into specific physical and mental traits. When conducted ethically, this is a legitimate and important field of genetic research. However, the work of Mengele, Verschuer, and their colleagues was warped by their belief in a pseudoscientific theory of race that was fundamental to Nazi ideology. This theory held that human races are genetically distinct from each other. It established a hierarchy of races and stressed that "inferior" races are genetically more likely to exhibit negative traits than members of "superior" races. These negative hereditary traits supposedly included more than just physical and mental illnesses and deficiencies. They also supposedly included socially unacceptable or immoral behaviors, such as vagrancy, prostitution, and criminality. According to the false theory of race, intermarriage between races passed negative traits to "superior" races and undermined them.

Mengele sought to identify specific physical and biochemical markers that could definitively identify the members of specific races. Mengele and his colleagues believed that finding such markers was vitally important for preserving the supposed racial superiority of the German people. For Mengele and his colleagues, the importance of the research justified conducting harmful and lethal experiments on people - in this case Auschwitz prisoners - whom they considered to be racially inferior.

Who were Mengele's Victims?

Mengele drew his victims mainly from two ethnic groups: Roma and Jews. These groups were of particular interest to biomedical researchers in Nazi Germany. Nazi ideology considered both Roma and Jews to be "subhuman" and to pose a threat to the German "race." For this reason, Nazi scientists did not consider medical ethics to apply to members of these groups.

While Mengele served at Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than 20,000 Roma were imprisoned there and hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived there on transports. Nowhere else in the world could scientists have access to so many members of these groups concentrated in one place. And nowhere else did they have the power to experiment on human beings in whatever way they wanted. Mengele commented to a colleague that it would be a crime not to take advantage of the opportunities for human experimentation at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Roma

In addition to choosing Roma as subjects for his medical experiments, Mengele conducted an anthropological study of the Roma men, women, and children in the Zigeunerlager . When there was an outbreak of Noma, a gangrene of the mouth, among Roma children in the camp, he assigned prisoner physicians to study it. Noma is a bacterial infection that primarily afflicts extremely malnourished children. However, Mengele believed that the Roma children at Auschwitz suffered from Noma because of their heredity rather than because of the conditions at the camp. The prisoner physicians discovered how to cure Noma, which was normally fatal. Nevertheless, all of the children who were cured were eventually murdered in the gas chambers.

Twins

In the 1930s, twins were a major focus of human genetic research. Before World War II, Verschuer and other biomedical researchers used twins to study the hereditary basis of diseases. These earlier researchers obtained the consent of the twins or their parents, but it was difficult for researchers to enlist many twins for these studies. At Auschwitz, Mengele collected hundreds of pairs of twins from among the Jews who arrived there on transports and from among the Roma imprisoned there. No researcher had ever been able to study and experiment on such a large number of twins.

Mengele ordered his staff to measure and record every aspect of the twins' bodies. He drew large amounts of blood from the twins and sometimes performed other painful procedures on them.

[...] They also gave us injections all over our bodies. As a result of these injections, my sister fell ill. Her neck swelled up as a result of a severe infection. They sent her to the hospital and operated on her without anesthetic in primitive conditions. (...)

From the account of Lorenc Andreas Menasche, camp number A 12090. 2

Mengele also murdered sets of twins at the same time in order to conduct autopsies of their corpses. After he studied the autopsies, Mengele sent some of their organs to the KWI-A.

Persons with Congenital Anomalies

When he conducted selections of arriving Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mengele looked for people with physical abnormalities. These people included dwarfs, people with gigantism, or persons who had a club foot. Mengele studied these people and then had them murdered. He sent their bodies to Germany for study by researchers.

Mengele also sought out Roma and Jews with heterochromia, a condition in which a person's eyes differ from each other in color. One of Mengele's colleagues at KWI-A was particularly interested in this condition. Mengele had persons with heterochromia murdered at Auschwitz and sent their eyes to this colleague.

Children

Most of the victims of Mengele's medical experiments were children. The children Mengele selected for experiments lived in separate barracks from the other prisoners and received somewhat better food and treatment. Mengele was friendly toward the children. Moshe Ofer, a survivor of Mengele's experiments, recalled in 1985 that

[Mengele] visited us as a good uncle, bringing us chocolate. Before applying the scalpel or a syringe, he would say: 'Don't be afraid, nothing is going to happen to you...' ...he injected chemical substances, performed surgery on Tibi's spine. After the experiments he would bring us gifts...In the course of later experiments, he had pins inserted into our heads. The puncture scars are still visible. One day he took Tibi away. My brother was gone for several days. When he was brought back, his head was all dressed in bandages. He died in my arms. 3

Mengele used children for his own experiments and also to support the work of the KWI-A. He collaborated in a study of the development of eye color by putting a substance supplied by one of his colleagues in the eyes of children and newborns. The results ranged from irritation and swelling to blindness and even death.

A prisoner who was assigned to care for Jewish twins selected for Mengele's experiments later described how the children reacted emotionally and physically to their treatment:

Samples of blood were collected first from the fingers and then from the arteries, two or three times from the same victims in some cases. The children screamed and tried to cover themselves up to avoid being touched. The personnel resorted to force. (...) Drops were also put into their eyes....Some pairs of children received drops in both eyes, and others in only one. ....The results of these practices were painful for the victims. They suffered from severe swelling of the eyelids, a burning sensation.... 4

Evading Justice

In January 1945, as the Soviet Red Army advanced through western Poland, Mengele fled Auschwitz with the rest of the camp's SS personnel. He spent the next few months serving at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and its subcamps. In the final days of the war, he donned a German army uniform and joined a military unit. After the war ended, the unit surrendered to US military forces.

Posing as a German army officer, Mengele became a US prisoner of war. The US Army released him in early August 1945, unaware that Mengele's name was already on a list of wanted war criminals.

From late 1945 until spring 1949, Mengele worked under a false name as a farmhand near Rosenheim, Bavaria. From here he was able to establish contact with his family. When US war crimes investigators learned of Mengele's crimes at Auschwitz, they tried to find and arrest him. Based on lies told by Mengele's family, however, the investigators concluded that Mengele was dead. The US effort to arrest him forced Mengele to recognize that he was not safe in Germany. With financial support from his family, Mengele immigrated to Argentina under yet another false name in July 1949.

By 1956, Mengele was well established in Argentina and felt so safe that he obtained Argentine citizenship as José Mengele. In 1959, however, he learned that West German prosecutors knew he was in Argentina and were seeking his arrest. Mengele immigrated to Paraguay and obtained citizenship there. In May 1960, Israeli intelligence agents abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel to be tried. Correctly guessing that the Israelis were also looking for him, Mengele fled Paraguay. With support from his family in Germany, he spent the rest of his life under an assumed name near São Paulo, Brazil. On February 7, 1979, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil. He was buried in a suburb of São Paulo under the assumed name "Wolfgang Gerhard."

The Discovery and Identification of Mengele's Body

In May 1985, the governments of Germany, Israel, and the United States agreed to cooperate in tracking down Mengele and bringing him to justice. German police raided the home of a Mengele family friend in Günzburg, Germany, and found evidence that Mengele had died and been buried near São Paulo. Brazilian police located Mengele's grave and exhumed his corpse in June 1985. American, Brazilian, and German forensic experts positively identified the remains as those of Josef Mengele. In 1992, DNA evidence confirmed this conclusion.

Mengele eluded arrest for 34 years and was never brought to justice.

Last Edited: Feb 21, 2023

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

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Prominent SS physician Josef Mengele, called the "angel of death" by his victims, conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners in the Auschwitz camp.

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holocaust survivors elie in podcasts | Listen Notes

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Podcast episodes featuring "holocaust survivors elie ". Listen Notes is the best podcast search engine.

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A synagogue in Seattle was vandalized with anti-Israel messaging on Sunday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance day, the Seattle Police said in a release Wednesday.

"This was a coordinated and focused attack," said Senior Rabbi Daniel Weiner, of Temple De Hirsch Sinai on Capitol Hill, who believes the timing of the attack was no coincidence.

Footage from the Temple De Hirsch Sinai shows two individuals equipped with backpacks and paint vandalizing the façade of the temple's old sanctuary - which is now gone, leavingan open plaza in its place, Weiner told CNN. Temple leadersare currently working with the FBI and Seattle Police Department to find the suspects.

Seattle Police released the video of the two suspects in a statement and is requesting the public's help to identify them.

The incident also comes days before Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's independence celebration, and less than a month before Jewish Heritage Month.

Cameras and fences were installed six years ago when another incident of vandalism occurred around the same area of the temple. Vandals spraypainted "Holocaust is Fake History" several months after former President Donald Trump took office, CNN reported.

The antisemitic graffiti from Sunday was kept up for several days before they covered it up, according to Weiner.

"It's incredibly important that we in the community bear witness to the fact that not only do these things happen, but there are people that - not only do people feel these things and have these views, but they are willing to criminally act upon them," he said.

Now, it has been covered with paint and primer to make way for a redemptive mural done by local teen artists as an effort to sanctify the space, the same measure that they took six years ago, said Weiner.

"We're looking to do that again because what we're hoping to do is really transform what would otherwise just be an act of terror," he said.

Seattle responds

One of the silver linings, Weiner says, is the outpouring of support from civic and community leaders who affirmed that the Jewish community is accepted and supported in Seattle.

Mayor Bruce Harrel tweeted: "We will not tolerate anti-Semitism in Seattle - we must all speak out against this disgusting act of violence."

While other temples in the area have experienced minor incidents, Temple De Hirsch Sinai says they experienced the brunt of Seattle's antisemitism.

"We are the largest, most visible, kind of iconic and historic Jewish institution [in Seattle]," Weinersaid. "And certainly the most visible Jewish institution to remain in the urban core of the city."

The community is resilient, he said, but their reaction to the incident is two-fold.

"One is a sense of pride and resistance and not wanting those who are doing these things to achieve their goals, which is to try to silence and intimidate us," says Weiner. "But the other feeling is that people are feeling that this is an uncomfortable confirmation of what we are learning about and also experiencing in the broader culture, which is a significant rise in antisemitism."

Antisemitism grows nationally

Last year, Seattle Police reported 33 incidents of bias crimes targeted towards religious groups. Over 75% of those incidents were targeted at the Jewish community.

Nationally, the Anti-Defamation League reported 3,697 antisemitic incidents throughout the United States in 2022, marking a 36% increase from 2021. Of those incidents, 589 occurred at Jewish institutions, the organizationsaid. They also reported that this is the third annualrecord for hate incidents in five years.

"Unfortunately, [antisemitism] is persisting and I don't know that [the attack] was met with surprise," Regina Friedland, Director of the American Jewish Committee in Seattle told CNN. "I think that many in the Jewish community want this event not to go unnoticed and let people see that hatred and how much more work we need to do as a community."

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international relations and national security

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Seattle synagogue vandalized day before Holocaust Remembrance Day | CNN

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A synagogue in Seattle was vandalized with anti-Israel messaging on Sunday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance day, the Seattle Police said in a release Wednesday. "This was a coordinated and focused attack," said Senior Rabbi Daniel Weiner, of Temple De Hirsch Sinai on Capitol Hill, who believes the timing of the attack was no coincidence.

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China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur population and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang.

Human rights groups believe China has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls "re-education camps", and sentenced hundreds of thousands to prison terms.

A series of police files obtained by the BBC in 2022 has revealed details of China's use of these camps and described the routine use of armed officers and the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy for those trying to escape.

The US is among several countries to have previously accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. The leading human rights groups Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have published reports accusing China of crimes against humanity.

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The Chinese government - speaking after details of the Xinjiang Police Files were published - said the peace and prosperity brought to Xinjiang as a result of its anti-terrorism measures were the best response to "all sorts of lies".

Who are the Uyghurs?

There are about 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

The Uyghurs speak their own language, which is similar to Turkish, and see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. They make up less than half of the Xinjiang population.

Recent decades have seen a mass migration of Han Chinese (China's ethnic majority) into Xinjiang, allegedly orchestrated by the state to dilute the minority population there.

Uyghur activists say they fear that the group's culture is under threat of erasure.

Where is Xinjiang?

Xinjiang lies in the north-west of China and is the country's largest region. Like Tibet, it is autonomous, meaning - in theory - it has some powers of self-governance. But in practice, both regions are subjected to major restrictions by the central government.

Xinjiang is a mostly desert region and produces about a fifth of the world's cotton. Human rights groups have voiced concerns that much of that cotton export is picked by forced labour, and in 2021 some Western brands removed Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains, leading to a backlash against the brands from Chinese celebrities and netizens.

In December 2020, research seen by the BBC showed that up to half a million people were being forced to pick cotton in Xinjiang. There is evidence that new factories have been built within the grounds of the re-education camps.

The region is also rich in oil and natural gas and because of its proximity to Central Asia and Europe is seen by Beijing as an important trade link.

In the early 20th Century, the Uyghurs briefly declared independence for the region but it was brought under the complete control of China's new Communist government in 1949.

The UK parliament declared in April 2021 that China was committing a genocide in Xinjiang.

A UN human rights committee in 2018 said it had credible reports that China was holding up to a million people in "counter-extremism centres" in Xinjiang.

The UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the files contained "shocking details of China's human rights violations".

Earlier, leaked documents known as the China Cables made clear that the camps were intended to be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline and punishments.

People who have managed to escape the camps have reported physical, mental and sexual torture. Women have spoken of mass rape and sexual abuse.

Anti-Han and separatist sentiment rose in Xinjiang from the 1990s, sometimes flaring into violence. In 2009 about 200 people died in clashes in Xinjiang, which the Chinese blamed on Uyghurs who wanted their own state. But in recent years a massive security crackdown has crushed dissent.

Xinjiang is now covered by a pervasive network of surveillance, including police, checkpoints, and cameras that scan everything from number plates to individual faces. According to Human Rights Watch, police are also using a mobile app to monitor people's behaviour, such as how much electricity they are using and how often they use their front door.

Since 2017, when President Xi Jinping issued an order saying all religions in China should be Chinese in orientation, there have been further crackdowns. Campaigners say China is trying to eradicate Uyghur culture.

The Xinjiang Police Files, which all date from before 2019, shed further light on Uyghurs being punished for alleged crimes that took place years ago. Many appear to have been targeted for their mobile phone use, for listening to "illegal lectures" or not using their phones enough, which is regarded as a sign the user is trying to evade digital surveillance.

What does China say?

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In response to the Xinjiang Police Files, China's foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that the documents were "the latest example of anti-China voices trying to smear China". He said Xinjiang enjoyed stability and prosperity and residents were living happy, fulfilled lives.

China says the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.

It insists that Uyghur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uyghurs.

China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uyghur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".

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Who are the Uyghurs and why is China being accused of genocide?

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China has been accused by the US of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Muslim minority group.

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Victims of the Nazi Era | Holocaust Encyclopedia

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The Nazis and their allies and collaborators carried out a systematic program of mass murder targeting the Jews of Europe. In addition to murdering six million Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and murdered millions of others. Learn more about whom the Nazis targeted and why.

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

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

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Holocaust Denial and Distortion - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Holocaust denial is any attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism, prejudice against or hatred of Jews.

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Liberators and Survivors: The First Moments

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PBS NewsHour | Nationwide effort to ban books challenges freedom of speech | Season 2022 | PBS

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Nationwide effort to ban books challenges freedom of speech

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On Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the millions of people killed under Nazi Persecution, and in the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

The Holocaust was a terrible and defining episode of the twentieth century, which undoubtedly changed the course of history.

After the Holocaust, the international community adopted a legal definition of the crime of 'genocide'. They wanted to make sure that never again would the crimes of the Holocaust be allowed to happen.

However, in the years following the Holocaust, genocide has continued to be carried out. On Holocaust Memorial Day we remember all those who were murdered or affected by the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Subsequent genocides represent a failure of humanity to learn from the Holocaust and are a reminder for all of us that we must be prepared to guard against genocide happening again in the future.
Click on the links below to learn about what happened during the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution and subsequent genocides:

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Learn about the Holocaust and genocides

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On Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the millions of people killed under Nazi Persecution, and in the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. The Holocaust was a terrible and defining episode of the twentieth century, which undoubtedly changed the course of history.

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The Auschwitz Album- Visual Evidence of the Process Leading to the Mass Murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau

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

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

Why did the Nazis target Jews?

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

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

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

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

Where did the Holocaust take place?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geography of the Holocaust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mass Shootings

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

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

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

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

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

Killing Centers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Purpose of the Ghettos

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

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

Life in the Ghettos

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

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

Liquidating the Ghettos

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

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

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

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

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

German Institutions, Organizations, and Individuals

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

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

Non-German Governments and Institutions

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

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

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

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

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

Individuals across Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did the Holocaust end?

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

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

How did some Jews survive the Holocaust?

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

Survival outside of German-Controlled Europe

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

Survival in German-Controlled Europe

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

Aftermath

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

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

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

Last Edited: Nov 5, 2021

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

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Introduction to the Holocaust: What was the Holocaust?

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

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This educational resource for secondary school aged students tells the story of Miep Gies, the woman who supported Anne Frank and her family when they were in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.
You can download a printable version of the case study here
Miep was born over a hundred years ago in 1909, in Vienna. During World War One, when she was very young, she didn't have enough food and as a result, Miep often became ill. In 1920 a Dutch family offered to look after her and help her get better. Miep's parents thought that this was the best thing for her and that Holland would be a safe place for her to be.

When she was older, Miep started working for a Jewish man called Otto Frank. Otto had moved to Holland from Germany in the 1930s with his wife Edith and daughters Margot and Anne. Germany had become dangerous for Jews and Otto thought Holland would be safer.

Jewish people across Europe were being treated unfairly and were losing many of their rights. Soon it was no longer safe for Otto and his family in Amsterdam. Otto knew he had to hide his family to keep them safe. So on 6 July 1942, Otto and his family went to the upper rear rooms of his office building where he had created a hiding space for them, a secret room. As well as the Frank family, some of Otto's Jewish friends also hid here as they needed somewhere safe to hide too. It was Miep Gies, Otto's employee and friend who helped them stay hidden and safe for over two years. During this time, whilst hidden away, Otto's daughter Anne kept a diary of her thoughts about what it was like for a young girl to live in one room for all that time, always living in fear.

Miep knew that if she was found helping a Jewish family, she could be arrested. She did everything possible to avoid being caught and didn't even tell her own parents what she was doing. Miep sourced food from different places and would make several trips each day so she never had to carry more than one or two bags at a time. Sometimes she would hide other things under her coat. She avoided visiting the hiding place during office hours so that other people she worked with would not grow suspicious and those in hiding were asked to keep as quiet as possible during the day.

It was years later that Miep said:

'They were powerless; they didn't know where to turn... We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need.'

One morning in August 1944, Miep was sitting at her desk when she looked up and saw an officer with a gun; he had come to arrest everyone in hiding. Having been betrayed, the hiding place was found and the Franks were arrested and everyone was taken away.

Miep had been truly courageous for hiding the Franks and their friends for all of this time. This was at a great risk to herself, and it was only because the arresting officer was from her home city of Vienna, that she escaped arrest herself - because the officer was from Miep's community she was safe.

Miep still wanted to help, she couldn't let the Franks down now. She collected all of the money she could find and went to the police station to see if she could have Otto and his family freed - but this was without success.

When Miep visited the secret room after the arrest, she rescued Anne's diary and locked it away, keeping it safe for Anne's return. Of the Frank family, only Otto survived. After the war, Miep gave the unread diaries to Otto. Anne had always wanted to become a famous writer. Tragically, this only happened after she had died. It was because of Miep that Otto survived. Miep wasn't Jewish, she just saw the Franks as friends that needed her help.

© AFS Amsterdam /AFF Basel - Reproduced by permission from the Anne Frank Trust UK

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Miep Gies

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This educational resource for secondary school aged students tells the story of Miep Gies, the woman who supported Anne Frank and her family when they were in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. You can download a printable version of the case study here Miep was born over a hundred years ago in 1909, in Vienna.

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This school teaches African American history course rejected by DeSantis

The College Board is making changes to its AP African American Studies course for high school students amid criticism from Florida's governor Ron DeSantis - a potential front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination - following a public spat between the two parties. CNN's Ed Lavandera visited McLain High School in Tulsa, OK, where the pilot version is being taught and spoke to teachers and students.

This school teaches African American history course rejected by DeSantis

Man arranges life savings to send 33 kids to college

An AI-generated song copied the Weeknd and Drake's voice. Who gets paid?

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Video: This school teaches African American history course rejected by DeSantis | CNN

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The College Board is making changes to its AP African American Studies course for high school students amid criticism from Florida's governor Ron DeSantis - a potential front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination - following a public spat between the two parties.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This list of genocides includes estimates of all deaths which were directly or indirectly caused by genocide, as it is defined by the UN Convention on Genocide. It excludes mass killings which may be referred to as genocide by some scholars and are variously also called mass murder, crimes against humanity, politicide, classicide, or war crimes, such as the Thirty Years' War (7.5 million deaths), Japanese war crimes (3 to 14 million deaths), the Red Terror (100,000 to 1.3 million deaths), the Atrocities in the Congo Free State (1 to 15 million deaths), the Great Purge (0.6 to 1.75 million deaths), the Great Leap Forward and the famine which followed it (15 to 55 million deaths).[1] A broader list of genocides, ethnic cleansing and related mass persecution is available. Genocides in history include cases where there is less consensus among scholars as to whether they constituted genocide.

Definition

The United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group".[2]

List of genocides

Listed in descending order of lowest estimate.

Event

Location

From

To

Lowest
estimate

Highest
estimate

Proportion of group killed

Myanmar

2017

Present

9,000-13,700
[9]

43,000
[10]

Before the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis and the military crackdown in 2016 and 2017, the Rohingya population in Myanmar was around 1.0 to 1.3 million, chiefly in the northern Rakhine townships, which were 80-98% Rohingya. Since 2015, over 900,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to south-eastern Bangladesh alone, and more to other surrounding countries, and major Muslim nations. More than 100,000 Rohingyas in Myanmar are confined in camps for internally displaced persons.

Islamic State-controlled territory in northern Iraq and Syria

2014

2019

Darfur, Sudan

2003

Present

Rwanda

1994

60-70% of Tutsis in Rwanda killed[26]
7% of Rwanda's total population killed[26]

Bosnia and Herzegovina

1992

1995

Just over 8,000
[32]

31,107-39,199
[33][34]

More than 3% of the Bosniak population of Bosnia and Herzegovina died during the Bosnian War.[35]

Somalia

1988

1991

German-occupied Europe

1941

1945

4,204,000
[58][59][60]

Around 2/3 of the Jewish population of Europe.[62][63][page needed ]

German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war,[64][65] part of the Generalplan Ost and Hunger Plan

German-occupied Europe

1941

1945

During World War II, Nazi Germany engaged in a policy of deliberate maltreatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), in contrast to their treatment of British and American POWs. This policy, which amounted to deliberately starving and working to death Soviet POWs, was grounded in Nazi racial theory, which depicted Slavs as sub-humans (Untermenschen).[68][65]

Holodomor, man-made famine,[69]:  70-78, 134-35   concurrent with extermination of national elite, liquidation of the Ukrainian church, and forcible population transfers.[70]

Ukraine and the heavily Ukrainian-populated northern Kuban,[69]: 70  in the Soviet Union

1932

1933

3,000,000 [69]: 70, 147

5,000,000 [69]: 70, 147

In the Ukrainian SSR, an estimated 3-3.5 million people died of starvation and disease (from malnutrition), with total demographic losses, including famine-derived decrease in fertility, 4.5-4.8 million.[69]: 42, 76, note 2  Total population was about 32.3 million in 1932. The classification as a genocide is debated, see Holodomor genocide question.

Nazi crimes against the Polish nation,[71][72] part of the Generalplan Ost

German-occupied Europe

1939

1945

From 6% to 10% of the total Polish gentile population. In addition, 3 million Polish Jews were killed during the Holocaust in Poland.[73]

Democratic Kampuchea

1975

1979

15-33% of total population of Cambodia killed[87][88] including:

99% of Cambodian Viets
50% of Cambodian Chinese and Cham
40% of Cambodian Lao and Thai
25% of Urban Khmer
16% of Rural Khmer

Ottoman Empire
(territories of present-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq)

1915

1917

90% of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire killed[96] The share of Christians in area within Turkey's current borders declined from 20-22% in 1914, or about 3.3.-3.6 million people, to around 3% in 1927.[97]

Ottoman Empire
(territories of present-day Turkey)

1914

1922

At least 25% of Greeks in Anatolia (Turkey) killed[citation needed ]

Russian-occupied Circassia (territories of present-day Russia)

1864[N 17]

1867

95%-97% of total Circassian population killed or deported by the Russian forces.[121][122] Only a small percentage who accepted to convert to Christianity, Russify and resettle within the Russian Empire were spared. The remaining Circassian populations who refused were thus forcefully dispersed, deported or killed. Today, most Circassians live in exile.[123]

East Pakistan (territories of present-day Bangladesh)

1971

2%[citation needed ] to 4% of the population of East Pakistan[129]

Assyrian genocide

Ottoman Empire

(territories of present-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq)

1915

1919

The Holocaust in Croatia including the Serbian genocide[N 19]

Independent State of Croatia (territories of present-day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Syrmia)

1941

1945

Ottoman Empire

1894

1896

200,000
[136]

300,000
[136]

Carthage (present day Tunisia)

149 BCE

146 BCE

150,000[143]

450,000[144]

All but 50,000 of the population of Carthage were killed in the siege, the survivors of which were enslaved.

German-occupied Europe

1935[147]

1945

25% of Romani people in Europe killed

Genocide of Acholi and Lango people under Idi Amin[N 25]

Uganda

1972

1978

Burundi

1972

Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia

Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region, in German-occupied Poland (now Ukraine)

1943

1945

The exact number of ethnic Polish fatal victims is unknown. Most estimates vary from over 60,000 to more than 200,000 depending on the source used, though lower and higher numbers are occasionally cited too (when different regions and perpetrators are included). A neutral halfway point between the numbers most often cited in an IPN conference of Polish and Ukrainian scholars is 85,000 deaths. Some Ukrainians who helped Polish families hide and/or flee as well as 340 Czechs and smaller numbers of Russians were also killed in the ethnic cleansing.[185] At the same time, about 10,000-15,000 Ukrainians were killed by the Polish Home Army and other Polish units, in reprisal attacks.[186]

Occupied Yugoslavia (territories of present-day Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro)

1941

1945

California, United States

1846

1873

9,492-16,094
[212][213][216]

120,000
[213][217]

Amerindian population in California declined by 80% during the period

Queensland, Australia

1840

1897

3.3% to over 50% of the aboriginal population was killed
(10,000[222] to 65,180[223] killed out of 125,600)[clarification needed ]

Dominican Republic

1937

1937

12,000

20,000[229]

Details of the casualties are still hard to gather.

Black War
(Genocide of Aboriginal Tasmanians)[N 38]

Van Diemen's Land, Australia

Mid 1820s

1832

~100%

[247]

See also

Political extermination campaigns

Notes

1. ^ The Rohingya genocide[3][4][5][6] against the Rohingya ethnic minority in Myanmar (Burma) by the Myanmar military and Buddhist extremists. The violence began on 25 August 2017 and has continued since, reaching its peak during the months of August and September in 2017. The Rohingya people are a largely Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar who have faced widespread persecution and discrimination for several decades. They are denied citizenship under the 1982 Myanmar nationality law, and are falsely regarded as Bengali immigrants by much of Myanmar's Bamar majority, to the extent that the government refuses to acknowledge the Rohingya's existence as a valid ethnic group.[7] The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) is a Rohingya insurgent group that was founded in 2013 to "liberate [the Rohingya] people from dehumanising oppression".[8] On 25 August 2017, ARSA claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks on police posts that reportedly killed twelve security forces. Myanmar's military forces immediately launched a series of retaliatory attacks against Rohingya civilians, and were joined by local Buddhist extremists. Together they burnt down hundreds of Rohingya villages, killed thousands of Rohingya men, women, and children, tortured countless others, and sexually assaulted countless Rohingya women and girls. Several Rohingya refugees say they were forced to witness soldiers throwing their babies into burning houses to die in the fire. Numerous Rohingya refugee women and girls have provided accounts of being brutally gang raped. The violence has resulted in a refugee crisis, with an estimated 693,000 Rohingya fleeing to overcrowded refugee camps in the neighboring country of Bangladesh.

2. The ^ Genocide of Yazidis ' by ISIS included mass killing, rape and enslavement of girls and women, forced abduction, indoctrination and recruitment of Yazidis boys (aged 7 to 15) to be used in armed conflicts, forced conversion to Islam and expulsion from their ancestral land. The United Nations' Commission of Inquiry on Syria officially declared in its report that ISIS was committing genocide against the Yazidis population.[11] It is difficult to assess a precise figure for the killings[12] but it is known that some thousand of Yazidis men and boys were still unaccounted for and ISIS genocidal actions against Yazidis people were still ongoing, as stated by the International Commission in June 2016.See also: 2007 Yazidi communities bombings.

3. The ^ Darfur genocide refer to the war crimes and crimes against humanity such as massacre and genocidal rape that occurred within the Darfur region during the War in Darfur perpetrated by Janjaweed militias and the Sudanese government. These atrocities have been called the first genocide of the 21st century. Sudan's presidentOmar al-Bashir has been indicted for his role in the genocide by the United Nations.

4. ^ Effacer le tableau ("erasing the board") is the operational name given to the systematic extermination of the Bambuti pygmies by rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The primary objective of Effacer le tableau was the territorial conquest of the North Kivu province of the DRC and ethnic cleansing of Pygmies from the Congo's eastern region whose population numbered 90,000 by 2004.[19]

5. Eastern Pygmy population was reduced to 90,000 after a campaign that killed 60,000^ [21] implying a 40% decline

6. During the ^ First Congo War, troops of the Rwanda-backed Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL) attacked refugee camps in Eastern DRC, home to 527,000 and 718,000 Hutu refugees in South-Kivu and North-Kivu respectively.[22] Elements of the AFDL and, more so, of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) systematically shelled numerous camps and committed massacres with light weapons. These early attacks cost the lives of 6,800-8,000 refugees and forced the repatriation of 500,000 - 700,000 refugees back to Rwanda.[23] As survivors fled westward of the DRC, the AFDL units hunted them down and attacked their makeshift camps, killing thousands more.[24] These attacks and killings continued to intensify as refugees moved westward as far as 1,800 km away. The report of the United Nations Joint Commission reported 134 sites where such atrocities were committed. On 8 July 1997, the acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that "about 200,000 Hutu refugees could well have been massacred".[24]

7. Some 50 perpetrators of the ^ Rwandan genocide have been found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, but most others have not been charged due to lack of witness accounts. Another 120,000 were arrested by Rwanda; of these, 60,000 were tried and convicted in the Gacaca court system. Perpetrators who fled into Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo) were used as a justification when Rwanda and Uganda invaded Zaire (First and Second Congo Wars). It is recognised by the international community as a genocide.

8. The ^ Bosnian genocide comprises localised, in time and place, massacres like in Srebrenica[28] and in Žepa committed by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995, as well as the scattered ethnic cleansing campaign throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska[29] during the 1992-95 Bosnian War.[30] Srebrenica marked the most recent act of genocide committed in Europe and was the only theater of that war that fulfilled the definition of genocide as set by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). On 31 March 2010, the Serbian Parliament passed a resolution condemning the Srebrenica massacre and apologising to the families of Srebrenica for the deaths of Bosniaks ("Bosnian Muslims").[31]

9. The ^ Genocide of Isaaqs or "Hargeisa Holocaust"[36][37] was the systematic, state-sponsored massacre of Isaaq civilians between 1988 and 1991 by the Somali Democratic Republic under the dictatorship of Siad Barre.[38] The number of civilian deaths in this massacre is estimated to be between 50,000 and 100,000 according to various sources,[39][40][41] while local reports estimate the total civilian deaths to be upwards of 200,000 Isaaq civilians.[42] This included the leveling and complete destruction of the second and third largest cities in Somalia, Hargeisa (90 per cent destroyed)[43] and Burao (70 per cent destroyed) respectively,[44] and had caused 400,000[45][46] Somalis (primarily of the Isaaq clan) to flee their land and cross the border to Hartasheikh in Ethiopia as refugees, creating the world's largest refugee camp then (1988),[47] with another 400,000 being internally displaced.[45][48][49] In 2001, the United Nations commissioned an investigation on past human rights violations in Somalia,[38] specifically to find out if "crimes of international jurisdiction (i.e. war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide) had been perpetrated during the country's civil war". The investigation was commissioned jointly by the United Nations Co-ordination Unit (UNCU) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The investigation concluded with a report confirming the crime of genocide to have taken place against the Isaaqs in Somalia.[38]

10. On 5 December 2012, Sweden's parliament, the ^ Riksdag, adopted a resolution by the Green party to officially recognise Anfal as genocide. The resolution was passed by all 349 members of parliament.[52][disputed ] On 28 February 2013, the British House of Commons formally recognised the Anfal as genocide following a campaign led by Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi, who is of Kurdish descent.[53] South Korea recognised the Anfal as genocide on June 13 of 2013.[54]

11. Initially it was carried out in German-occupied Eastern Europe by paramilitary death squads (^ Einsatzgruppen) by shooting or, less frequently, using ad hoc built gassing vans, and later in extermination camps by gassing.[57]

12. The ^ Cambodian genocide is the commonly used term for the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot[76] that forced the urban population to relocate savagely to the countryside, among torture, mass executions, forced labour, and starvation.[77][78][79] Up to 20,000 mass graves, the infamous Killing Fields, were uncovered,[80] where at least 1,386,734 murdered victims found their final resting place.[81] The Khmer Rouge Tribunal found that targeting of Vietnamese and Cham minorities constituted a genocide under the UN Convention.[82][83]

13. The ^ Armenian genocide,[89][90] carried out by the Young Turks, included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, and mass starvation. It occurred concurrently with the Assyrian and Greek genocides; some scholars consider these to form a broader genocide targeting all of the Christians in Anatolia.[91][92] Overall, about 2 million Christians were killed in Anatolia between 1894 and 1924, 40 percent of the original population.[93]

14. For the ^ Greek genocide other sources give 500,000-1,200,000 casualties between Pontic, Cappadocian and Ionians Greeks. The genocide, instigated by the Ottoman government, included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Greek Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments.

15. ^ Dzungar genocide. The Manchu Qianlong Emperor of Qing China issued his orders for his Manchu Bannermen to carry out the genocide and eradication of the Dzungar nation, ordering the massacre of all the Dzungar men and enslaving Dzungar women and children.[100] The Qianlong Emperor moved the remaining Zunghar people to the mainland and ordered the generals to kill all the men in Barkol or Suzhou, and divided their wives and children to Qing soldiers.[101][102] The Qing soldiers who massacred the Dzungars were Manchu Bannermen and Khalkha Mongols. In an account of the war, Wei Yuan wrote that about 40% of the Dzungar households were killed by smallpox, 20% fled to Russia or the Kazakh Khanate, and 30% were killed by the army, leaving no yurts in an area of several thousands of Chinese miles except those of the surrendered.[103][104][105] Clarke wrote 80%, or between 480,000 and 600,000 people, were killed between 1755 and 1758 in what "amounted to the complete destruction of not only the Zunghar state but of the Zunghars as a people."[103][106] Historian Peter Perdue has shown that the decimation of the Dzungars was the result of an explicit policy of extermination launched by the Qianlong Emperor.[103] Although this "deliberate use of massacre" has been largely ignored by modern scholars,[103] Mark Levene, a historian whose recent research interests focus on genocide, has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was "arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence".[107]

16. The ^ Circassian genocide refers to the ethnic cleansing, massive annihilation, displacement,[108] destruction and expulsion of the majority of the indigenous Circassians from historical Circassia, which roughly encompassed the major part of the North Caucasus and the northeast shore of the Black Sea. This occurred in the aftermath of the Caucasian War in the last quarter of the 19th century.[109] The displaced people moved primarily to the Ottoman Empire. FormerRussian President Boris Yeltsin's May 1994 statement admitted that resistance to the tsarist forces was legitimate, but he did not recognise "the guilt of the tsarist government for the genocide."[110] In 1997 and 1998, the leaders of Kabardino-Balkaria and of Adygea sent appeals to the Duma to reconsider the situation and to issue the needed apology; to date, there has been no response from Moscow. In October 2006, the Adygeyan public organizations of Russia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Syria, the United States, Belgium, Canada and Germany have sent the president of the European Parliament a letter with the request to recognise the genocide against Adygean (Circassian) people.[111] On May 21, 2011, theParliament of Georgia passed a resolution, stating that "pre-planned" mass killings of Circassians by Imperial Russia, accompanied by "deliberate famine and epidemics", should be recognised as "genocide" and those deported during those events from their homeland, should be recognised as "refugees". Georgia, which has poor relations with Russia, has made outreach efforts to North Caucasian ethnic groups since the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.[112] Following a consultation with academics, human rights activists and Circassian diaspora groups and parliamentary discussions in Tbilisi in 2010 and 2011, Georgia became the first country to use the word "genocide" to refer to the events.[112][113][114] On 20 May 2011 the parliament of the Republic of Georgia declared in its resolution[115] that the mass annihilation of the Cherkess (Adyghe) people during the Russian-Caucasian war and thereafter constituted genocide as defined in the Hague Convention of 1907 and the UN Convention of 1948.

17. ^ Genocide in Bangladesh. Massacres, killings, rape, arson and systematic elimination of religious minorities (particularly Hindus), political dissidents and the members of the liberation forces of Bangladesh were conducted by the Pakistan Army with support from paramilitary militias-the Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams-formed by the radical Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party.[124] Although Bengali Hindus were specifically targeted, the majority of victims were Muslim.[125]

18. ^ Genocide by the Ustaše including the Serbian Genocide. German-Italian installed puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia murdered Serbs, Jews, Romani, and anti-Ustashe Croats and Bosniaks inside its borders, many in concentration camps, most notably Jasenovac camp. Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Ustaše, enacted racial laws similar to those of Nazi Germany, declaring Jews, Romani, and Serbs "enemies of the people of Croatia". He escaped to Spain after the war with the assistance of the Roman Catholic Church and fatally injured there some years later in an assassination attempt.[132]

19. The ^ Hamidian massacres (Armenian: Համիդյան ջարդեր, Turkish: Hamidiye Katliamı, French: Massacres hamidiens), also referred to as the Armenian Massacres of 1894-1896[135] and Armenian genocide,[135] were massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire that took place in the mid-1890s. It was estimated casualties ranged from 80,000 to 300,000,[136] resulting in 50,000 orphaned children.[137] The massacres are named after Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who, in his efforts to maintain the imperial domain of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, reasserted Pan-Islamism as a state ideology. Although the massacres were aimed mainly at the Armenians, they turned into indiscriminate anti-Christian pogroms in some cases, such as the Diyarbekir massacre, where, at least according to one contemporary source, up to 25,000 Assyrians were also killed.[139] Themassacres began in the Ottoman interior in 1894, before becoming more widespread in the following years. Between 1894 and 1896 was when the majority of the murders took place. The massacres began tapering off in 1897, following international condemnation of Abdul Hamid. The harshest measures were directed against the long persecuted Armenian community as calls for civil reform and better treatment from the government went ignored. The Ottomans made no allowances for the victims' age or gender, and massacred all with brutal force.[140] This occurred at a time when the telegraph could spread news around the world, and the massacres received extensive coverage in the media of Western Europe and North America.

20. The destruction of Carthage during the ^ Third Punic War by the Roman Republic is often characterized by scholars such as Ben Kiernan as a genocide.[141][142]

21. ^ Porajmos (Romani pronunciation: IPA: [pʰoɽajˈmos]), or Samudaripen ("Mass killing"), the Romani genocide or Romani Holocaust, was the planned and attempted effort by the government of Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate part of the Romani people of Europe. On 26 November 1935, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their German citizenship expanded the category "enemies of the race-based state" to include Romani, the same category as the Jews, and in some ways they had similar fates.[145][146]

22. The ^ Polish Operation of the NKVD was a mass murder specifically aimed at the Polish ethnic group in the USSR by the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Historian Michael Ellman asserts that the 'national operations', particularly the 'Polish operation', may constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention.[151] His opinion is shared by Simon Sebag Montefiore, who calls the Polish operation of the NKVD 'a mini-genocide.'[152] Historian Timothy Snyder called the Polish Operation genocidal: "It is hard not to see the Soviet "Polish Operation" of 1937-38 as genocidal, as more than 100,000 innocent people were killed on the spurious grounds that theirs was a disloyal ethnicity and since Stalin spoke of "Polish filth"."[153] Norman Naimark called Stalin's policy towards Poles in the 1930s "genocidal"[154] but did not consider the entire Great Purge genocidal since it targeted political opponents as well.[154]

23. ^ Aardakh also known as Operation Lentil (Russian: Чечевица, Chechevitsa; Chechen: Вайнах махкахбахар Vaynax Maxkaxbaxar) was the Soviet expulsion of the whole of the Vainakh (Chechen and Ingush) populations of the North Caucasus to Central Asia during World War II. The expulsion, preceded by the 1940-1944 insurgency in Chechnya, was ordered on 23 February 1944 by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria after approval by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, as a part of Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of non-Russian Soviet ethnic minorities between the 1930s and the 1950s.
The deportation encompassed their entire nations, well over 500,000 people, as well as the complete liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Hundreds of thousands[158][page needed ][159][160][161] of Chechens and Ingushes died or were killed during the round-ups and transportation, and during their early years in exile. The survivors would not return to their native lands until 1957. Many in Chechnya and Ingushetia classify it as an act of genocide, as did the European Parliament in 2004.[162][163]

24. After ^ Idi Amin Dada overthrow the regime of Milton Obote in 1971, he declared the Acholi and Lango tribes enemies, as Obote was a Lango and he saw the fact that they dominated the army as a threat.[168] In January 1972, Amin issued an order to the Ugandan army ordering that they assemble and kill all Acholi or Lango soldiers, and then commanded that all Acholi and Lango be rounded up and confined within army barracks, where they were either slaughtered by the soldiers or killed when the Ugandan air force bombed the barracks.[168]

25. The ^ East Timor genocide refers to the "pacification campaigns" of state sponsored terror by the Indonesian government during their occupation of East Timor. Oxford University held an academic consensus calling the Indonesian Occupation of East Timor genocide and Yale university teaches it as part of their "Genocide Studies" program.[169][170] Precise estimates of the death toll are difficult to determine. The 2005 report of the UN's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) reports an estimated minimum number of conflict-related deaths of 102,800 (+/− 12,000). Of these, the report says that approximately 18,600 (+/− 1,000) were either killed or disappeared, and that approximately 84,000 (+/− 11,000) died from hunger or illness in excess of what would have been expected due to peacetime mortality. These figures represent a minimum conservative estimate that CAVR says is its scientifically-based principal finding. The report did not provide an upper bound, however, CAVR speculated that the total number of deaths due to conflict-related hunger and illness could have been as high as 183,000.[171] The truth commission held Indonesian forces responsible for about 70% of the violent killings.[172]

26. ^ Burundian genocide. In the long sequence of civil fights that occurred between Tutsi and Hutu since Burundi's independence in 1962, the 1972 mass killings of Hutu by the Tutsi and the 1993 mass killings of Tutsis by the majority-Hutu populace are both described as genocide in the final report of the International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi presented to the United Nations Security Council in 1996.

27. Genocidal massacres and ethnic cleansing of ethnic ^ Muslims and Croats by Yugoslav royalists and nationalists Chetniks across large areas of Occupied Yugoslavia (modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia) during World War II in Yugoslavia, on the basis of creating a post-war Greater Serbia.[187][188][189] The Moljević plan ("On Our State and Its Borders") and the 1941 'Instructions' issued by Chetnik leader, Draža Mihailović, advocated for the cleansing of non-Serbs. Death toll by ethnicity is estimated to be between 18,000 and 32,000 Croats and between 29,000 and 33,000 Muslims.[191]

28. The ^ deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar Qırımtatar halqınıñ sürgünligi; Ukrainian Депортація кримських татар; Russian Депортация крымских татар) was the ethnic cleansing of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars or, according to the other sources, 423,100 of them (89,2 % were women, children and elderly people) in 18-20 May 1944; one of the crimes of the Soviet totalitarian regime. It was carried out by Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet state security and secret police, acting on behalf of Joseph Stalin. Within three days, Beria's NKVD used cattle trains to deport women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red Army, to the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of the ten ethnicities who were encompassed by Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union. The deportation is recognised as a genocide by the countries of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Canada respectively; as well as various scholars. Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland". Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay and Pyotr Grigorenko both classified the event as a genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in a list of Soviet policies that "meet the standard of genocide."[195]

29. The ^ Genocide in German South West Africa was the campaign to exterminate the Herero and Nama people that the German Empire undertook in German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia). It is considered one of the first genocides of the 20th century.

30. ^ Guatemalan genocide. The government forces of Guatemala and allied paramilitary groups have been condemned by the Historical Clarification Commission for committing genocide against the Maya population[206][207] and for widespread human rights violations against civilians during the civil war fought against various leftist rebel groups. At least an estimated 200,000 persons died by arbitrary executions, forced disappearances and other human rights violations. A quarter of the direct victims of human rights violations and acts of violence were women.

31. The ^ California genocide[212][213] refers to the destruction of individual tribes like the Yuki people during the Round Valley Settler Massacres of 1856-1859,[214] general massacres perpetrated by settlers chasing the gold rush against Indians like the Bloody Island massacre, or Klamath River "War of Extermination"[215] along with the overall decline of the Indian population of California due to disease and starvation exacerbated by the massacres.

32. Queensland represents the single bloodiest colonial frontier in Australia. Thus the records of Queensland document the most frequent reports of shootings and massacres of indigenous people, the three deadliest massacres on white settlers, the most disreputable frontier police force, and the highest number of white victims to frontier violence on record in any Australian colony. Thus some sources have characterized these events as a ^ Queensland Aboriginal genocide.[219][220][221][222]

33. The ^ Parsley massacre was the 1937 mass killing of Haitians in the Dominican Republic on the direct orders of President Rafael Trujillo in order to cleanse Dominica of Haitian migration. After reports of Haitians stealing crops from Dominican residents along the Northern border, Trujillo gave the order to his troops to exterminate all Haitians living in the country's Northern region. The Dominican army then interrogated thousands of civilians demanding that each victim say the word "parsley". If the accused could not pronounce the word to the interrogators satisfaction, they were deemed to be Haitians and shot.[224] These armed forces killed Haitians with rifles, machetes, shovels, knives, and bayonets. Haitian children were reportedly thrown in the air and caught by soldiers' bayonets, then thrown on their mothers' corpses.[225] Some died while trying to flee to Haiti across the Artibonite River, which has often been the site of bloody conflict between the two nations.[226] Survivors who managed to cross the border and return to Haiti told stories of family members being hacked with machetes and strangled by the soldiers, and children bashed against rocks and tree trunks.[227] The use of military units from outside the region was not always enough to expedite soldiers' killings of Haitians. U.S. legation informants reported that many soldiers "confessed that in order to perform such ghastly slaughter they had to get 'blind' drunk."[228]: 167  Several months later, a barrage of killings and repatriations of Haitians occurred in the southern frontier.

34. The ^ 1804 Haiti massacre is considered to be a genocide by many scholars[230],[231] as it was intended to destroy the Franco-Haitian population following the Haitian Revolution. The massacre was ordered by King Jean-Jacques Dessalines to remove the remainder of the white population from Haiti, and lasted from January to 22 April 1804. During the massacre, entire families were tortured and killed, and by the end of it, Haiti's white population was virtually non-existent.

35. The ^ Selk'nam Genocide was the genocide of the Selk'nam people, indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in South America, from the second half of the 19th to the early 20th century. Spanning a period of between ten and fifteen years the Selk'nam, which had an estimated population of some three thousand, saw their numbers reduced to 500.[233]

36. The genocide of the Moriori began in the fall of 1835. The invasions of the Chatham Islands left the Moriori people and their culture to die off. Those who survived were either kept as slaves or eaten and Moriori were not sanctioned to marry other Moriori or have children within their race. This caused their people and their language to be endangered. There were only 101 Moriori people left out of 2000 who had survived in 1863.^ [237]

37. The extinction of ^ Aboriginal Tasmanians was called an archetypal case of genocide by Rafael Lemkin[244] (coiner of the word genocide) among other historians, a view supported by more recent genocide scholars like Ben Kiernan who covered it in his book Blood and Soil: A History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. This extinction also includes the Black War, which would make the war an act of genocide. Historians like Keith Windschuttle among other historians disagree with this interpretation in discourse known as the History wars.

References

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3. ^ Camilla Siazon (8 May 2018). "The Rohingya Crisis and the Meaning of Genocide". Council on Foreign Relations.

4. ^ "UN official says Rohingya crisis has 'hallmarks of genocide'". Associated Press. 1 February 2018.

5. ^ BenarNews (23 August 2017). "Southeast Asia's Newest Rebel Group Calls Bangladesh 'Great Neighbor'". Radio Free Asia.

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8. ^ Spencer, Richard (2014-10-14). "Isil carried out massacres and mass sexual enslavement of Yazidis, UN confirms". Daily Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on 2022-01-12.

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10. Penketh, Anne (2004-07-07). "Extermination of the pygmies". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2018-12-21.

11. ^ Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed Within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Between March 1993 and June 2003 (PDF) (Report). Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2010.

12. ^ Ezimet, Kisangani (2000). "The Massacre of Refugees in Congo: A Case of UN Peacekeeping Failure and International Law". The Journal of Modern African Studies. Cambridge University Press. 38 (2): 163-202. doi:10.1017/S0022278X0000330X. JSTOR 161648. S2CID 154818651.

13. ^ F. Emizet, Kisangani N. (July 2000). "The Massacre of Refugees in Congo: A Case of UN Peacekeeping Failure and International Law". The Journal of Modern African Studies. 38 (2): 163-202. doi:10.1017/S0022278X0000330X. JSTOR 161648. S2CID 154818651.

14. ^ Guichaoua, André (2020). "Counting the Rwandan Victims of War and Genocide: Concluding Reflections". Journal of Genocide Research. 22 (1): 125-141. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1703329. S2CID 213471539.

15. ^ Gutman, Roy (1993). A Witness to Genocide. Lisa Drew Books. ISBN 978-0020329954.

16. Most recent estimate from the ICMP for Srebrenica alone: ^ "ICMP and the Srebrenica Genocide" (PDF). International Commission on Missing Persons. July 2020.

17. ^ Footnotes in source identify numbers as June 2012.

18. The two figures consider all ^ Bosniak civilians killed during the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina. For the second figure, see: Ball, Patrick; Tabeau, Ewa; Verwimp, Philip (17 June 2007). "The Bosnian Book of Dead: Assessment of the Database" (PDF). Falmer: The Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

19. ^ Zwierzchowski, Jan; Tabeau, Ewa (1 February 2010). "The 1992-95 War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Census-Based Multiple System Estimation of Casualties' Undercount" (PDF). Conference Paper for the International Research Workshop on 'The Global Costs of Conflict'. The Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) and The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) 1-2 February 2010, Berlin: 15.

20. ^ Ingiriis, Mohamed Haji (2016-07-02). ""We Swallowed the State as the State Swallowed Us": The Genesis, Genealogies, and Geographies of Genocides in Somalia". African Security. 9 (3): 237-58. doi:10.1080/19392206.2016.1208475. ISSN 1939-2206. S2CID 148145948.

21. ^

22. "Conflict in Somalia: Drivers and Dynamics" (PDF). World Bank. p. 10. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2005-03-16.

23. ^ Africa Watch. 5: 4. 1993.

24. For a listing of the number of murdered Jews, detailed by country, see ^ Dawidowicz, Lucy (2010). The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945. Open Road Media. Appendix A. ISBN 978-1453203064.

25. * ^ Riep, Leonhard (2020). "The Production of the Muselmann and the Singularity of Auschwitz: A Critique of Adriana Cavarero's Account of the "Auschwitz Event"" (PDF). Hypatia. 35 (4): 635. doi:10.1017/hyp.2020.41. ...between 5 and 6 million. According to Wolfgang Benz, at least 5.29 million up to around 6 million Jews of every age were murdered (Benz 1991, 17), whereas Raul Hilberg counts 5.1 million dead (Hilberg 2003, 1320-21)

26. ^ *

27. ^

Bloxham, Donald (2009). The Final Solution: A Genocide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 1. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199550333.003.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-955034-0 - via Google Books. Between 5,100,000 and 6,200,000

McKale, Donald M. (2006) [2002]. Hitler's Shadow War: The Holocaust and World War II. Taylor Trade Publishing. p. 454. ISBN 978-1-4616-3547-5 - via Google Books. According to the most reliable estimates, a minimum of 5,290,000 and maximum of slightly over 6 million Jews died.

Welch, Steven Robert (2001). A Survey of Interpretive Paradigms in Holocaust Studies and a Comment on the Dimensions of the Holocaust; and "The Annihilation of Superfluous Eaters": Nazi Plans for and Use of Famine in Eastern Europe. Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Genocide Studies Program. p. 12. In one of the first scholarly attempts to quantify the overall scope of the Holocaust, Gerald Reitlinger in 1953 gave a minimum figure of 4,194,200 and a maximum of 4,581,200 Jewish victims... Raul Hilberg in his standard work estimated the total at 5.1 million... The study arrives at a minimum figure of 5.29 million and a maximum of just over six million. These figures may now need to be revised (probably upward) on the basis of material from the archives of the former Soviet Union. Benz's book, however, should be considered as the most thorough and reliable study now available.

28. ^ "Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 13 June 2018. According to the American Jewish Yearbook, the Jewish population of Europe was about 9.5 million in 1933. In 1950, the Jewish population of Europe was about 3.5 million.

29. ^ Earl Porter, Thomas (20 November 2018). "Hitler's Rassenkampf in the East: The Forgotten Genocide of Soviet POWs". Nationalities Papers. 37 (6): 839-859. doi:10.1080/00905990903230785. S2CID 162190846.

30. Calvocoressi, Peter; Wint, Guy (1989). Total War (Revised ed.). Viking. The total number of prisoners taken by the German armies in the USSR was in the region of 5.5 million. Of these, the astounding number of 3.5 million or more had been lost by the middle of 1944 and the assumption must be that they were either deliberately killed or done to death by criminal negligence. Nearly two million of them died in camps and close on another million disappeared while in military custody either in the USSR or in rear areas; a further quarter of a million disappeared or died in transit between the front and destinations in the rear; another 473,000 died or were killed in military custody in Germany or Poland.

31. ^ Naimark, Norman M. (2010). Stalin's Genocides. Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity. Vol. 12. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-14784-0 - via Google Books. The Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide. There is enough evidence-if not overwhelming evidence-to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR in 1932-33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin's hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of 'home rule' as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.

32. ^ Lemkin, Raphael (2008) [1953]. "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine" (PDF). In Luciuk, Lubomyr; Grekul, Lisa (eds.). Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine. Kashtan Press. ISBN 978-1896354330. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 March 2012.

33. ^

34. "Polish Victims". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is estimated that the Germans killed between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II. In addition, the Germans murdered at least 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland.

35. ^

36. ^

37. ^ The CGP, 1994-2008 Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale University.

38. ^ Kiernan, Ben (2019). "Genocidal targeting: Two groups of victims in Pol Pot's Cambodia". In Bushnell, P. Timothy; Shlapentokh, Vladimir; Vanderpool, Christopher; Sundram, Jeyaratnam (eds.). State Organized Terror: The Case Of Violent Internal Repression. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-31305-5.

39. ^ Heuveline, Patrick (1998). "'Between One and Three Million': Towards the Demographic Reconstruction of a Decade of Cambodian History (1970-79)". Population Studies. 52 (1): 49-65. doi:10.1080/0032472031000150176. JSTOR 2584763. PMID 11619945.

40. ^ Robertson, Geoffrey (2016). "Armenia and the G-word: The Law and the Politics". The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 69-83. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3. Put another way - if these same events occurred today, there can be no doubt that prosecutions before the ICC of Talaat and other CUP officials for genocide, for persecution and for other crimes against humanity would succeed. Turkey would be held responsible for genocide and for persecution by the ICJ and would be required to make reparation.14 That Court would also hold Germany responsible for complicity with the genocide and persecution, since it had full knowledge of the massacres and deportations and decided not to use its power and influence over the Ottomans to stop them. But to the overarching legal question that troubles the international community today, namely whether the killings of Armenians in 1915 can properly be described as a genocide, the analysis in this chapter returns are sounding affirmative answer.

41. ^ Lattanzi, Flavia (2018). "The Armenian Massacres as the Murder of a Nation?". The Armenian Massacres of 1915-1916 a Hundred Years Later: Open Questions and Tentative Answers in International Law. Springer International Publishing. pp. 27-104. ISBN 978-3-319-78169-3. Starting from the claim by the Armenian community and the majority of historians that the 1915-1916 Armenian massacres and deportations constitute genocide as well as Turkey's fierce opposition to such a qualification, this paper investigates the possibility of identifying those massacres and deportations as the destruction of a nation. On the basis of a thorough analysis of the facts and the required mental element, the author shows that a deliberate destruction, in a substantial part, of the Armenian Christian nation as such, took place in those years. To come to this conclusion, this paper borrows the very same determinants as those used in the case-law of the Military Tribunals in occupied Germany, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in genocide cases.

42. ^ "The Armenian Genocide (1915-16): In Depth". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Although the term genocide was not coined until 1944, most scholars agree that the mass murder of Armenians fits this definition. The CUP government systematically used an emergency military situation to effect a long-term population policy aimed at strengthening Muslim Turkish elements in Anatolia at the expense of the Christian population (primarily Armenians, but also Christian Assyrians). Ottoman, Armenian, US, British, French, German, and Austrian documents from the time reveal that the CUP leadership intentionally targeted the Armenian population of Anatolia.

43. ^ Ze'evi, Dror; Morris, Benny (2020). "Response to Critique: The thirty-year genocide. Turkey's destruction of its Christian minorities, 1894-1924, by Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2019, 672 pp., USD$35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9780674916456". Journal of Genocide Research. 22 (4): 561-566. doi:10.1080/14623528.2020.1735600. S2CID 216395523.

44. ^ Suny, Ronald Grigor (2015). "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton University Press. p. xxi. ISBN 978-1-4008-6558-1.

45. ^ Sjöberg, Erik (2016). The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe. Berghahn Books. p. 234. ISBN 978-1-78533-326-2. Activists tend to inflate the overall total of Ottoman Greek deaths, from the cautious estimates between 300,000 to 700,000...

46. ^ Jones, Adam (September 13, 2010). Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Routledge. p. 166. ISBN 9781136937972. An estimate of the Pontian Greek death toll at all stages of the anti-Christian genocide is about 350,000; for all the Greeks of the Ottoman realm taken together, the toll surely exceeded half a million, and may approach the 900,000 killed that a team of US researchers found in the early postwar period.

47. ^ Millward, James A. (2007). Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. Columbia University Press. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-231-13924-3 - via Google Books.

48. ^

49. ^ Wei Yuan. 聖武記 Military history of the Qing Dynasty (in Chinese). Vol. 4. 計數十萬戶中，先痘死者十之四，繼竄入俄羅斯哈薩克者十之二，卒殲於大兵者十之三。除婦孺充賞外，至今惟來降受屯之厄鲁特若干戶，編設佐領昂吉，此外數千里間，無瓦剌一氊帳。

50. ^ Lattimore, Owen (1950). Pivot of Asia; Sinkiang and the inner Asian frontiers of China and Russia. Little, Brown. p. 126.

51. ^ Clarke, Michael Edmund (2004). In the Eye of Power (PDF) (doctoral thesis). Brisbane: Griffith University. p. 37. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 29, 2012.

52. ^ Goble, Paul (2005-07-15). "Circassians demand Russian apology for 19th century genocide". Radio Free Europe. Vol. 8, no. 23. Radio Liberty.

53. ^ "Georgia Recognizes 'Circassian Genocide'". Civil Georgia. 2011-05-20. Archived from the original on 2012-09-18.

54. ^ "Грузия признала геноцид черкесов в царской России // Сайт "Лента.Ру"". lenta.ru (in Russian). 2011-05-20.

55. ^

56. ^ Shenfield, Stephen D. (1999). Levine, Mark D.; Roberts, Penny (eds.). The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide. Massacres in History. p. 154. The number who died in the Circassian catastrophe of the 1860s could hardly, therefore, be less than one million, and may well have been closer to one-and-a-half million

57. ^ Richmond, Walter. The Circassian Genocide. p. 132. If we assume that Berzhe's middle figure of 50,000 was close to the number who survived to settle in the lowlands, then between 95 percent and 97 percent of all Circassians were killed outright, died during Evdokimov's campaign, or were deported.

58. ^ Rosser-Owen, Isla. "The First Circassian Exodus to the Ottoman Empire (1858-1867), and the Ottoman Response, based on the accounts of Contemporary British Observers" (PDF). Circassianworld.

59. ^ "Part 5: Chapter 2, paragraph 33". Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report. 1974. Archived from the original on 16 August 2016.

60. ^

61. While the official Pakistani government report (^ Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report 1974) estimated that the Pakistani army was responsible for 26,000 killings in total, other sources have proposed various estimates ranging between 200,000 and 3 million. Indian Professor Sarmila Bose recently expressed the view that a truly impartial study has never been done, while Bangladeshi ambassador Shamsher M. Chowdhury has suggested that a joint Pakistan-Bangladeshi commission be formed to properly investigate the event.
Chowdury, Bose comments - Dawn Newspapers Online.
Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the 20th Century: Bangladesh - Matthew White's website.

62. ^ Rummel, R.J. (January 1997). Death By Government. Routledge. p. 331. ISBN 1560009276. The human death toll over only 267 days was incredible. Just to give for five out of the eighteen districts some incomplete statistics published in Bangladesh newspapers or by an Inquiry Committee, the Pakistani army killed 100,000 Bengalis in Dacca, 150,000 in Khulna, 75,000 in Jessore, 95,000 in Comilla, and 100,000 in Chittagong. For eighteen districts the total is 1,247,000 killed. This was an incomplete toll, and to this day no one really knows the final toll. Some estimates of the democide (i.e. Rummel's 'death by government') are much lower-one is of 300,000 dead-but most range from 1 million to 3 million. ... The Pakistani army and allied paramilitary groups killed about one out of every sixty-one people in Pakistan overall; one out of every twenty-five Bengalis, Hindus, and others in East Pakistan. If the rate of killing for all of Pakistan is annualised over the years the Yahya martial law regime was in power (March 1969 to December 1971), then this one regime was more lethal than that of the Soviet Union, China under the communists, or Japan under the military (even through World War II).

63. ^ Travis, Hannibal (December 2006). Native Christians Massacred': The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians During World War I. Genocide Studies and Prevention. Vol. 1. pp. 327-371.

64. ^

65. Excluding the Jews and Roma people sent to the German extermination camps.

66. Adalian, Rouben Paul (2010). Historical Dictionary of Armenia (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. p. 154..

67. ^ "Fifty Thousand Orphans made So by the 80,kish Massacres of Armenians". The New York Times. December 18, 1896. The number of Armenian children under twelve years of age made orphans by the massacres of 1895 is estimated by the missionaries at 50.000

68. ^ Kiernan, Ben (2004). "The First Genocide: Carthage, 146 BC" (PDF). Diogenes. 51 (203): 27-39. doi:10.1177/0392192104043648. S2CID 143199778 - via Yale University.

69. ^ Kiernan, Ben (2004). "The First Genocide: Carthage, 146 BC" (PDF). Diogenes. 51 (203): 27-39. doi:10.1177/0392192104043648. S2CID 143199778 - via Yale University.

70. ^ Milton, Sybil (February 1992). "Nazi Policies towards Roma and Sinti 1933-1945". Journal of Gypsy Lore Society. 5. 2 (1): 1-18.

71. ^ König, Ulrich (1989). Sinti und Roma unter dem Nationalsozialismus [Sinti and Roma under National Socialism] (in German). Bochum: Brockmeyer. ISBN 9783883397054 - via Google Books. The count of half a million Sinti and Roma murdered between 1939 and 1945 is too low to be tenable.

72. ^ Niewyk, Donald L.; Nicosia, Francis R. (2000). The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust. Columbia University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-231-50590-1 - via Google Books.

73. ^ Latham, Judith, ed. (1995). "First US Conference on Gypsies in the Holocaust". Current Affairs Bulletin (3-23928). Some estimates are higher, e.g. Sybil Milton: "Something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half Romanies and Sinti were murdered in Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945"

74. ^ Ellman, Michael (June 2007). "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33 Revisited". Europe-Asia Studies. 59 (4): 663-693. doi:10.1080/09668130701291899. JSTOR 20451381. S2CID 53655536.

75. Genocide: A World History, Norman M. Naimark

76. ^ Rubenstein, Joshua. "The Devils' Playground". The New York Times. Rubenstein is the Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA and a co-editor of The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories.
Almost all victims of the NKVD shootings were men, wrote Michał Jasiński, most with families. Their wives and children were dealt with by the NKVD Order No. 00486. The women were generally sentenced to deportation to Kazakhstan for an average of 5 to 10 years. Orphaned children without relatives willing to take them were put in orphanages to be brought up as Soviet, with no knowledge of their origins. All possessions of the accused were confiscated. The parents of the executed men - as well as their in-laws - were left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well. Statistical extrapolation, wrote Jasiński, increases the number of Polish victims in 1937-1938 to around 200-250,000 depending on size of their families.

77. Michael Ellman, ^ Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33 Revisited PDF file page 686

78. ^ Rummel, R. J. (1990). Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1-56000-887-3.

79. Wong, Tom K. (2015). Rights, Deportation, and Detention in the Age of Immigration Control. Stanford University Press. p. 68. ^ ISBN 9780804794572. LCCN 2014038930. page 68

80. ^ "Combat Genocide Association | Uganda 1971-1985".

81. ^ Payaslian, Simon. "20th Century Genocides". Oxford bibliographies.

82. ^

83. ^

84. ^ "Chega! The CAVR Report". Archived from the original on May 13, 2012.

85. Precise estimates of the death toll are difficult to determine. The 2005 report of the UN's ^ Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) reports an estimated minimum number of conflict-related deaths of 102,800 (+/− 12,000). Of these, the report says that approximately 18,600 (+/− 1,000) were either killed or disappeared, and that approximately 84,000 (+/− 11,000) died from hunger or illness in excess of what would have been expected due to peacetime mortality. These figures represent a minimum conservative estimate that CAVR says is its scientifically-based principal finding. The report did not provide an upper bound, however, CAVR speculated that the total number of deaths due to conflict-related hunger and illness could have been as high as 183,000. The truth commission held Indonesian forces responsible for about 70% of the violent killings.
*This estimates comes from taking the minimum killed violently applying the 70% violent death responsibility given to Indonesian military combined with the minimum starved.
"Conflict-related Deaths in Timor Leste, 1954-1999. The Findings of the CAVR Report" (PDF).
"The CAVR Report". Archived from the original on 2012-05-13.

86. Precise estimates of the death toll are difficult to determine. The 2005 report of the UN's ^ Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) reports an estimated minimum number of conflict-related deaths of 102,800 (+/− 12,000). Of these, the report says that approximately 18,600 (+/− 1,000) were either killed or disappeared, and that approximately 84,000 (+/− 11,000) died from hunger or illness in excess of what would have been expected due to peacetime mortality. These figures represent a minimum conservative estimate that CAVR says is its scientifically-based principal finding. The report did not provide an upper bound, however, CAVR speculated that the total number of deaths due to conflict-related hunger and illness could have been as high as 183,000. The truth commission held Indonesian forces responsible for about 70% of the violent killings:*This estimates comes from taking the maximum killed violently applying the 70% violent death responsibility given to Indonesian military combined with the maximum starved.

87. ^ White, Matthew. "Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century: C. Burundi (1972-73, primarily Hutu killed by Tutsi) 120,000".

88. ^ "Fonds AG-062 - United Nations International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi (UNICIB) (1995-1996)". United Nations - Archives and Records Management Section. 2002. p. 20 ¶ 85. The Micombero regime responded with a genocidal repression that is estimated to have caused over a hundred thousand victims and forced several hundred thousand Hutus into exile

89. ^ Snyder, Timothy (1999). ""To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All": The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943-1947". Journal of Cold War Studies. 1 (2): 86-120. doi:10.1162/15203979952559531. S2CID 57564179.

90. ^ Timothy Snyder (2002). Jan-Werner Müller (ed.). Memory and Power. Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. Cambridge University Press. p. 43. ISBN 052100070X.

91. ^ Katchanovski, Ivan (2015). "Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine". Communist and Post-Communist Studies. 48 (2-3): 217-228. doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2015.06.006.

92. ^ Hryciuk, Grzegorz (2001). "Vtraty naselennia na Volyni u 1941-1944rr". Ukraina-Polshcha: Vazhki Pytannia. Warsaw: Tyrsa. 5.

93. ^ Davies, Norman (24 February 2005). God's Playground A History of Poland: Volume II: 1795 to the Present. ISBN 9780199253401 - via Google Books.

94. ^ Ahonen, Pertti (2008). Peoples on the Move: Population Transfers and Ethnic Cleansing Policies During World War II and Its Aftermath. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 99.

95. Hryciuk, Grzegorz; Palski, Zbigniew; Niedzielko, Romuald, eds. (2010), "Wołyń 1943 - Rozliczenie" [Wołyń 1943 - Settlement] (PDF), Konferencje IPN (in Polish), 41: 27-30

96. ^ Redžić, Enver (2005). Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War. London; New York: Frank Cass. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-7146-5625-0 - via Google Books.

97. ^ Allworth, Edward (1998). The Tatars of Crimea: Return to the Homeland: Studies and Documents. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 6. ISBN 9780822319948. LCCN 97019110. OCLC 610947243.

98. ^ ""Punished Peoples" of the Soviet Union: The Continuing Legacy of Stalin's Deportations" (PDF). Human Rights Watch 1991. p. 34.

99. ^ "Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide". Whitaker Report. United Nations. According to the 1985 United Nations' Whitaker Report, some 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Nama (50% of the total Nama population) were killed between 1904 and 1907

100. ^ Moses 2008, p. 296.
Sarkin-Hughes, Jeremy (2008). Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century: The Socio-Legal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia, 1904-1908. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International. p. 142. ISBN 978-0313362569.

Nuhn 1989.
Hoffmann, Anette (2007). Baronian, Marie-Aude; Besser, Stephan; Jansen, Yolande (eds.). Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 33. ISBN 978-90-420-2129-7 - via Google Books.

101. ^ "UN Whitaker Report on Genocide, 1985". Prevent Genocide International. paragraphs 14 to 24, pages 5 to 10

102. ^ "Guatemala Memory of Silence" (PDF). Commission for Historical Clarification Conclusions and Recommendations. Guatemala City. 1999.

103. Namely the 83% of the "fully identified" 42,275 civilians killed by human rights violations during the Guatemalan Civil War. See ^ CEH 1999, p. 17, and

104. Benjamin Madley
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe,1846-1873

105. ^ Kiernan, Ben. "8". Blood and Soil A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Genocide in the United States. pp. 310-363.

106. ^ Heizer (1993). Crescent City Herald. pp. 35-36. quoted in Sacramento newspaper

107. ^ Baldry, Hannah; McKeon, Alisa; McDougal, Scott. "Queensland's Frontier Killing Times - Facing Up to Genocide". QUT Law Review. 15 (1): 92-113. ISSN 2201-7275.

108. ^ Palmer, Alison (1998). "Colonial and modern genocide: explanations and categories". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 21: 89-115. doi:10.1080/014198798330115.

109. Evans, Raymond; Ørsted-Jensen, Robert (2014-07-09). ""I Cannot Say the Numbers that Were Killed": Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier". AHA (paper). University of Queensland: Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2467836.

110. ^
anyone of African descent found incapable of pronouncing correctly, that is, to the complete satisfaction of the sadistic examiners, became a condemned individual. This holocaust is recorded as having a death toll reaching thirty thousand innocent souls, Haitians as well as Dominicans.

111. ^ Turits, Richard Lee (2004). Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History. Stanford University Press.

112. Robins, Nicholas A. and Adam Jones. "Introduction: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice." In: Robins, Nicholas A. and Adam Jones (editors). ^ Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice. Indiana University Press, 2009. ISBN 0253220777, 9780253220776. p. 3: "The Great Rebellion and the Haitian slave uprising are two examples of what we refer to as "subaltern genocide": cases in which subaltern actors-those objectively oppressed and disempowered-adopt genocidal strategies to vanquish their[...]" - Also stated in Jones, Adam. Chapter 11: "Subaltern genocide: Genocides by the oppressed." In: The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflections. Routledge, June 26, 2013. ISBN 1135047154, 9781135047153. p. 169.

113. ^ Adhikari, Mohamed; Carmichael, Cathie; Jones, Adam; Kapila, Shruti; Naimark, Norman; Weitz, Eric D. (2018). "Genocide and Global and/or World History: Reflections". Journal of Genocide Research. 20 (1): 134-153. doi:10.1080/14623528.2017.1363476. S2CID 80081680.

114. ^ Gardini, Walter (1984). "Restoring the Honour of an Indian Tribe-Rescate de una tribu". Anthropos (in German). 79 (4/6): 645-7.

115. ^ "Tommy Solomon". Archived from the original on 2016-01-23.

116. ^ King, Michael (1989). Moriori: A People Rediscovered. Auckland: Viking. p. 136.

117. ^ Reynolds, Henry (2004). Moses, A. Dirk (ed.). Genocide in Tasmania?. Genocide and settler society: Frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in Australian History. Berghan Books. p. 128.

118. Clements 2013, pp. 329-331

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Williams, Dianne (2012). Race, Ethnicity, and Crime (soft cover ed.). Algora Publishing. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-87586-915-5.

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Toggle the table of contents From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This list of genocides includes estimates of all deaths which were directly or indirectly caused by genocide, as it is defined by the UN Convention on Genocide.

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The U.S. and the Holocaust
Holocaust survivor Eva Geiringer reflects on life in Auschwitz. In 1944, Americans first learned details of the camp when three escapees meticulously documented what they'd seen. When the War Refugee Board received the report from Switzerland, they made the firsthand testimony public, and it became headline news. But Americans still couldn't grasp the scale and scope of the crime.

Aired: 09/21/22

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The U.S. and the Holocaust | Life in Auschwitz | Episode 3 | PBS

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The U.S. and the Holocaust Holocaust survivor Eva Geiringer reflects on life in Auschwitz. In 1944, Americans first learned details of the camp when three escapees meticulously documented what they'd seen. When the War Refugee Board received the report from Switzerland, they made the firsthand testimony public, and it became headline news.

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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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Remember Holocaust Survivors and Victims - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Find resources on survivors and victims, connect with survivors, learn more about Days of Remembrance, and more.

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The U.S. and the Holocaust
As Jewish children living in Germany, these Holocaust survivors saw their lives turn upside down when the Nazis came into power. But the changes didn't happen overnight. Instead, they were gradual - step by step - and no one realized how much worse things would get.

Aired: 09/18/22

Rating: TV-14

From:

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The U.S. and the Holocaust | The Gradual Rise of Nazi Germany | Episode 1 | PBS

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The U.S. and the Holocaust As Jewish children living in Germany, these Holocaust survivors saw their lives turn upside down when the Nazis came into power. But the changes didn't happen overnight. Instead, they were gradual - step by step - and no one realized how much worse things would get.

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Antisemitic incidents in the US reached their highest level last year since the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights non-governmental organization, began recording them in 1979.

The incidents including assault, vandalism and harassment increased by more than a third in just one year and reached nearly 3,700 cases in 2022, a new ADL report published Thursday found.

And the upward trend is alarming.

Last October, a former student killed a University of Arizona professor who he believed to be Jewish, according to the ADL report. This February, a man was charged with two hate crimes after he allegedly shot two people who were exiting two separate synagogues in Los Angeles.

Earlier this month, Stanford University police launched a hate crime investigation after an antisemitic drawing containing swastikas and an image resembling Adolf Hitler was found on a Jewish student's dorm room door.

"Despite the rise of antisemitism, there is still a perception in many people's minds that Jews are not under threat, that they are successful and wealthy, and are not a targeted minority," Mark Weitzman, scholar of the history of antisemitism and chief operating officer at The World Jewish Restitution Organization, told CNN.

The ADL report, which includes information gathered directly from victims and local community leaders, as well from police statistics, shows an increase across a range of hate-based incidents, from offensive comments to antisemitic slurs written on property, to physical attacks. In 2022, there was a 69% increase in attacks against visibly identifiable Orthodox Jews, the report found.

"The brazenness of these attacks, sometimes in broad daylight, is a huge concern," Oren Segal, Vice President of the ADL Center on Extremism told CNN.

"The findings of our latest report quantify what a lot of people in the Jewish community have been feeling - that antisemitism seems to be popping up everywhere and often," Segal said.

American Jews are disproportionately affected by hate crime compared to other religious groups, according to the FBI hate crime figures for 2021. Yet official law enforcement statistics of these incidents are notoriously underreported, experts told CNN. ADL records indicate that the number of anti-Jewish incidents (criminal and not) is more than three times higher countrywide than the FBI records of confirmed hate crimes show, and almost 1.5 times higher in New York City than what official police records reveal.

Every fourth American Jewish adult, Orthodox or not, was targeted in an antisemitic incident ranging from physical attacks to remarks in person or online, a separate survey by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) published in February found.

The AJC survey found that while both Jewish Americans and the general public see antisemitism as a problem, less than half of the general population think antisemitism has increased at least to some extent in the past five years, compared to about four in five Jewish Americans.

"While the American Jewish community is very aware of rising anti-Jewish sentiment, the general American public is not," said Robert Williams, a historian and executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California, who was also not involved in the ADL report.

"Non-Jewish populations in the United States haven't quite come to that point of making the realization that they also need to stand up against antisemitism, that antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem, but it's a collective problem - it's a threat to national security, and it's a threat to our democracy," Williams said.

Segal sees today's situation as an opportunity for American people to come together and reject the hatred.

"When a synagogue is firebombed, or somebody in the community is being attacked or harassed, it is important for others in that community, no matter what their religion or ethnicity, to say 'this does not represent us'," Segal said.

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Antisemitic incidents in the US are at the highest level recorded since the 1970s | CNN

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Antisemitic incidents in the US reached their highest level last year since the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights non-governmental organization, began recording them in 1979. The incidents including assault, vandalism and harassment increased by more than a third in just one year and reached nearly 3,700 cases in 2022, a new ADL report published Thursday found.

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In July 1995, with the back drop of the ongoing war, Bosnian Serb troops and paramilitaries led by Ratko Mladić descended on the town of Srebrenica and began shelling it. Around 8,000 Muslim men, and boys over 12 years old, were murdered in Srebrenica.

After the Second World War, Bosnia was one of six republics in the state of Yugoslavia. Marshal Tito ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 and succeeded in suppressing nationalist and ethnic tensions between the republics. However, following Tito's death in 1980, nationalist parties began to gain power in the republics and in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia disintegrated into six states. When Bosnia declared independence in 1992, it soon descended into war.

The population of Bosnia and Herzegovina consisted of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians who have close cultural ties with neighbouring Serbia), and Bosnian Croats (Roman Catholics who have close cultural ties with neighbouring Croatia). Bosnian independence was resisted by the Bosnian Serb population who saw their future as part of 'Greater Serbia'. Bosnia became the victim of the Bosnian Serbs' determined wish for political domination which it was prepared to achieve by isolating ethnic groups and, if necessary, exterminating them.

The Bosnian war resulted in the death of around 100,000 people, and the displacement of over two million men, women and children. A campaign of war crimes, 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide was perpetrated by Bosnian Serb troops under the orders of Slobodan Milošević (the President of Serbia), Radovan Karadžić (the Bosnian Serb leader), and Ratko Mladić (the Bosnian Serb commander).

In July 1995, Bosnian Serb troops and paramilitaries led by Ratko Mladić began shelling the town of Srebrenica. On 11 July, Ratko Mladić claimed Srebrenica for Bosnian Serbs. On 12 July, Bosniak men and boys over the age of 12 were forcibly separated from women and younger children, who were deported on trucks and buses.

The violence and killings culminated in a massacre that began on 13th July and lasted at least 72 hours, when around 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered in and around Srebrenica. Many were shot in the act of trying to escape. Their bodies were bulldozed into mass graves and concealed.

The genocide at Srebrenica is the largest incidence of mass-murder in Europe since World War Two.
Watch our short film about the genocide in Bosnia: Image: © Liam Hoare

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Bosnia: 1995

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The Bosnian war 1992-1995, resulted in the death of around 100,000 people, and the displacement of over two million men, women and children. A campaign of war crimes, 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide was perpetrated by Bosnian Serb troops under the orders of Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladić.

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https://www.claimscon.org/2021/04/it-started-with-words/

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Claims Conference in the Media | Press Inquiries | Publications | Videos | Updates

Holocaust Survivors Give Stunning Testimonies to Mark Holocaust Remembrance Day

Survivor-Led Digital Campaign Launched by the Claims Conference Shines a Light on Hatred Before the Holocaust

NEW YORK, N.Y.: April 8, 2021- Today, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) announces a new Holocaust survivor-led, digital campaign, #ItStartedWithWords.

Before local anti-Jewish laws were enacted, before neighborhood shops and synagogues were destroyed, and before Jews were forced into ghettos, cattle cars, and camps, words were used to stoke the fires of hate. #ItStartedWithWords is a digital, Holocaust education campaign posting weekly videos of survivors from around the world reflecting on those moments that led up to the Holocaust - a period of time when they could not have predicted the ease with which their long-time neighbors, teachers, classmates, and colleagues would turn on them, transitioning from words of hate to acts of violence.

"The Holocaust started with words," said Gideon Taylor, President of the Claims Conference. "Hateful words that were yelled in the park, spat on the street, and roared in the classroom. These words alienated, belittled, and shocked; but worse, these words gave birth to the horrific massacre of six million Jews. The #ItStartedWithWords campaign will show through first-hand survivor testimony that the Holocaust didn't come out of nowhere. It literally started with words."

Coming on the heels of the successful #NoDenyingIt campaign, the #ItStartedWithWords initiative is part of a broader effort to raise awareness of the importance of Holocaust education. Specifically, this campaign will use survivor testimony to give context to the origins of the Holocaust, the foundation of antisemitism that Hitler and the Nazis used to generate support across Europe before a single act of war was undertaken. The goal of the campaign is to show how words of hate can become actions, and how those actions can have unimaginable outcomes.

Greg Schneider, Executive Vice President of the Claims Conference said, "You don't wake up one morning deciding to participate in mass murder. Hate speech, propaganda, antisemitism, and racism were the roots that culminated in genocide. The shocking results of our 2020 U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, which found that 63 percent of Millennials and Gen Z did not know six million Jews were murdered, clarifies for us how important it is, not just to teach the history of the Holocaust, but to provide context for how such a horrific outcome like the Holocaust started.

Several well-known Holocaust survivors from around the world recorded videos to be posted for the campaign.

Holocaust survivor Abe Foxman, born in Poland in 1940, now lives in the U.S. In his campaign video post he shares his thoughts on the origins of the Holocaust, saying "The crematoria, gas chambers in Auschwitz and elsewhere did not begin with bricks, it began with words...evil words, hateful words, antisemitic words, words of prejudice. And they were permitted to proceed to violence because of the absence of words." Watch the video.

Holocaust survivor and Chairman, Yad Vashem Council Yisrael Meir Lau, born in Poland in 1937, now lives in Israel. His hometown of Piotrkow Trybunalski had more than 10,000 Jews before the war, but most were deported to Treblinka in 1942 and killed. "They thought they could eliminate a people with words," he says in his video post. "And then it turned out that it indeed happened." Watch the video.

Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, was born in 1932 in Munich, Germany where she still lives. In her video post she shares her first memory of being treated differently because she was a Jew. "It began with words. They came before the horrific acts, the murders, the crimes..." she says. "I was four years old, when I was in the courtyard of the house across the street, I wanted to play with the neighbor's children. I did that almost every day. But now the gate was suddenly locked. My friends looked at me silently, before I could understand what was going on, the concierge's wife came in and started yelling at me, 'Jewish children are not allowed to play with our children.' I was four years old. I didn't even know what Jews were." Watch the video.

Holocaust survivor Sidney Zoltak, born in Poland in 1931, now lives in Canada. In his video post, he remembers witnessing hate at a particularly young age: "When I was four years old in 1935, I visited my grandparents in a village where they ran the general store. In front of their store there were young Poles with signs 'Don't Buy From a Jew.' I didn't know what antisemitism was, but that was the first act of antisemitism that I witnessed. Antisemitism in Poland at that time was not only tolerated, but it was encouraged." Watch the video.

Holocaust survivor Aron Krell, born in 1927 in Lódź, Poland, now lives in the U.S. In his video he explains, "We heard the words... the Jews were cursed, the Jews are traitors and all of the problems in the world starts with the Jews, therefore what we have to do is get rid of the Jews." Watch the video.

Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, born in Austria in 1929, now lives in the United Kingdom. She was nine years old during her memory that she shares about her best friend's mother: "...my best friend was a Catholic girl; and on my way home I always went to her and played. When I went there, the mother stood at the door and looked at me with such hatred and said, 'We never want to see you here again!' And, she slammed the door in my face." Watch the video.

Holocaust survivor Colette Avital, born in 1940 in Bucharest, Romania, now lives in Israel. In her video post she remembers the words that were spat at her and her family. "There were usually words, like dirty Jew, as well as threats. 'We will kill you, we will eliminate you all. You are the scum of the earth.'" She reflects on the outcomes of those words saying, "Those words transformed into acts."

#ItStartedWithWords illustrates how racist and antisemitic speech led to actions that nearly saw the mass extermination of an entire people. To provide educational resources from partner museums and institutions, as well as the collection of the survivor videos from the campaign, the Claims Conference has also launched ItStartedWithWords.org, a web site that will serve as a resource for educators around the world.

Nearly 50 museums and institutions from around the world are participating in the campaign including: the United Nations (UN); the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM); Yad Vashem; the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA); Fondation Pour La Memoire De La Shoah; the Anne Frank House, Netherlands; UNESCO; the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin; the Anne Frank Center, Argentina; the Montreal Holocaust Museum; Holocaust Educational Trust of the UK; the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust; Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center; the Museum of Jewish Heritage; POLIN, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw and many more.

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"It Started With Words" - Claims Conference

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Claims Conference in the Media | Press Inquiries | Publications | Videos | Updates NEW YORK, N.Y.: April 8, 2021- Today, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) announces a new Holocaust survivor-led, digital campaign, #ItStartedWithWords.

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The number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling, and time is running out to tell their stories. Photographer Emily Steinberger is preserving her family’s history.

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60 Minutes: Sir Nicholas Winton "Saving the Children"

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The U.S. and the Holocaust
As Jewish children living in Germany, these Holocaust survivors saw their lives turn upside down when the Nazis came into power. But the changes didn't happen overnight. Instead, they were gradual - step by step - and no one realized how much worse things would get.

Aired: 09/18/22

Rating: TV-14

From:

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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The U.S. and the Holocaust | The Gradual Rise of Nazi Germany | Episode 1 | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The U.S. and the Holocaust As Jewish children living in Germany, these Holocaust survivors saw their lives turn upside down when the Nazis came into power. But the changes didn't happen overnight. Instead, they were gradual - step by step - and no one realized how much worse things would get.