# data[].attributes.body
refugee

noun

ref·​u·​gee

Definition of refugee

a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Refugees - Animated Map/Map | The Holocaust Encyclopedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Following World War II, several hundred thousand Jewish survivors remained in camps for displaced persons. The Allies established such camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy for refugees waiting to leave Europe. Most Jewish DPs preferred to emigrate to Palestine but many also sought entry into the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
LOS ANGELES - "We have no other means of self-defense than our solidarity and our knowledge that the cause for which we are suffering is a momentous and sacred cause," Albert Einstein wrote in 1939.

Einstein wrote the 1939 letter shortly before Hitler's invasion of Poland triggered World War II and the Holocaust - a rallying cry that echoed loudly enough in 2019 to fetch $134,343 at an auction for the original letter, which concluded on March 29.

Bidding for the letter, conducted by Los Angeles-based Nate D. Sanders Auctions, opened at $12,000, but escalated steadily amidst intense competition among 23 bidders.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

The final price exceeded by far the previous high sale of $53,504 among 20 Einstein letters offered by Sanders since 2017, according to company spokesman Samuel Heller.

Even the original iconic photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue at pursuing photographers came in second at $125,000.

In line with company policy, Sanders did not reveal the names of the seller or buyer of the letter.

Einstein mailed the letter in Princeton, New Jersey on June 10, 1939, as Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany and Hitler was preparing to launch World War II.

The letter was addressed to Dr. Maurice Lenz of New York, an activist in efforts to enable Jewish refugees to enter the United States, and opened with: "The power of resistance which has enabled the Jewish people to survive for thousands of years has been based to a large extent on traditions of mutual helpfulness."

Einstein concluded his letter to Lenz by writing: "It must be a source of deep satisfaction to you to be making so important a contribution toward rescuing our persecuted fellow-Jews from their calamitous peril and leading them toward a better future."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Einstein's 1939 letter calling for Jewish solidarity sells for over $134,000

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LOS ANGELES - "We have no other means of self-defense than our solidarity and our knowledge that the cause for which we are suffering is a momentous and sacred cause," Albert Einstein wrote in 1939.

# data[].attributes.body
Refugees from Nazi Germany on board the St. Louis en route to Cuba. The passengers were denied entry into Cuba and the US and were forced to return to Europe. 1939.

In a highly publicized event in May–June 1939, the United States refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the

St. Louis. The St. Louis appeared off the coast of Florida shortly after Cuban authorities cancelled the refugees' transit visas and denied entry to most of the passengers, who were still waiting to receive visas to enter the United States. Denied permission to land in the United States, the ship was forced to return to Europe. The governments of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium each agreed to accept some of the passengers as refugees. Of the 908 St. Louis passengers who returned to Europe, 254 (nearly 28 percent) are known to have died in the Holocaust. 288 passengers found refuge in Britain. Of the 620 who returned to the continent, 366 (just over 59 percent) are known to have survived the war.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.

The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

The First Concentration Camps in Germany

The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, the SA ( Sturmabteilung; commonly known as the Storm Troopers), the SS ( Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons-the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy.

German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. The SS established larger camps in Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo (the German secret state police) until 1936.

Centralization of the Concentration Camp System

The SS gained its independence from the SA in July 1934, in the wake of the Röhm purge. Hitler then authorized SS leader Heinrich Himmler to centralize the administration of the concentration camps and formalize them into a system. Himmler chose SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke for this task. Eicke had been the commandant of the SS concentration camp at Dachau since June 1933. Himmler appointed him Inspector of Concentration Camps, a new section of the SS subordinate to the SS Main Office.

After December 1934, the SS became the only agency authorized to establish and manage facilities that were formally called concentration camps. Local civilian authorities did continue to establish and manage forced-labor camps and detention camps throughout Germany. In 1937, only four concentration camps were left: Dachau, near Munich; Sachsenhausen near Berlin; Buchenwald near Weimar; and Lichtenburg near Merseburg in Saxony for female prisoners.

Purposes of the Camp System

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

To incarcerate people whom the Nazi regime perceived to be a security threat. These people were incarcerated for indefinite amounts of time.

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

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

Concentration Camp Administration

Already as commandant of Dachau in 1933, Eicke developed an organization and procedures to administer and guard a concentration camp. He issued regulations for the duties of the perimeter guards and for treatment of the prisoners. The organization, structure, and practice developed at Dachau in 1933-34 became the model for the Nazi concentration camp system as it expanded. Among Eicke's early trainees at Dachau was Rudolf Höss, who later commanded the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Special "political units on alert" ( Politische Bereitschaften) originally guarded the SS concentration camps. They were renamed "SS Guard Units" ( SS-Wachverbände) in 1935 and "SS Death's-Head Units" ( SS-Totenkopfverbände) in April 1936. One SS Death's-Head Unit was assigned to each concentration camp. After 1936, the camp administration, including the commandant, was also a part of the SS Death's-Head Unit.

Although all SS units wore the Death's-Head symbol (skull and crossbones) on their caps, only the SS Death's-Head Units were authorized to wear the Death's Head Symbol on their lapels. The "SS Death's-Head Division" of the Waffen SS was created in 1940. Its officers were recruited from concentration camp service. They also wore the Death's-Head symbol on their lapel.

The SS Death's-Head Unit at each camp was divided into two groups. The first was the camp staff, which covered:

the commandant and his personal staff

a Security Police officer and an assistant to maintain and update prisoner records

the commandant of the so-called protective detention camp (Schutzhaftlagerführer) which housed the prisoners, and his staff (including the labor allocation officer, the roll call officer, and the Blockführer, who were responsible for the individual prisoner barracks)

an administrative staff responsible for the fiscal and supply administration of the camp

an infirmary run by an SS physician assisted by one or two SS sanitation officers and/or medical orderlies.

The second group constituted the guard detachment ( SS-Wachbataillon), which prior to 1939 was at battalion strength.

The model established by Eicke in the mid-1930s characterized the concentration camp system until the collapse of the Nazi regime in the spring of 1945. The daily routine at Dachau, the methods of punishment, and the duties of the SS staff and guards became the norm, with some variation, at all German concentration camps.

Authority to Imprison People in Concentration Camps

After 1938, authority to incarcerate persons in a concentration camp formally rested exclusively with the German Security Police (made up of the Gestapo and the Criminal Police).

The Security Police had held this exclusive authority de facto since 1936. The "legal" instrument of incarceration was either the "protective detention" ( Schutzhaft) order or the "preventative detention" ( Vorbeugungshaft) order. The Gestapo could issue a "protective detention" order for persons considered a political danger after 1933. The Criminal Police could issue a "preventative detention" order after December 1937 for persons considered to be habitual and professional criminals, or to be engaging in what the regime defined as "asocial" behavior. Neither order was subject to judicial review, or any review by any German agency outside of the German Security Police. As the concentration camp system expanded, the camps fell within the exclusive authority of the SS. The German judicial administration had no jurisdiction with the growing camp system.

Expansion of the Camp System

Nazi Germany expanded by bloodless conquest into Austria and Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1939. The numbers of those labeled as political opponents and as "asocials" in German society increased, requiring the establishment of new concentration camps.

By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, unleashing World War II, there were six concentration camps in the so-called Greater German Reich: Dachau (founded 1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg in northeastern Bavaria near the 1937 Czech border (1938), Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria (1938), and Ravensbrück, the women's camp, established in Brandenburg Province, southeast of Berlin (1939), after the dissolution of Lichtenburg.

Forced Labor

From as early as 1934, concentration camp commandants used prisoners as forced laborers for SS construction projects such as the construction or expansion of the camps themselves. By 1938, SS leaders envisioned using the supply of forced laborers incarcerated in the camps for a variety of SS-commissioned construction projects. To mobilize and finance such projects, Himmler revamped and expanded the administrative offices of the SS and created a new SS office for business operations. Both agencies were led by SS Major General Oswald Pohl, who would take over the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in 1942.

Beginning a pattern that became typical after the war began, economic considerations had an increasing impact on the selection of sites for concentration camps after 1937. For instance, Mauthausen and Flossenbürg were located near large stone quarries. Likewise, concentration camp authorities increasingly diverted prisoners from meaningless, backbreaking labor to still backbreaking and dangerous labor in extractive industries, such as stone quarries and coal mines, and construction labor.

Concentration Camps after the Outbreak of World War II

After Nazi Germany unleashed World War II in September 1939, vast new territorial conquests and larger groups of potential prisoners led to the rapid expansion of the concentration camp system to the east. The war did not change the original function of the concentration camps as detention sites for the incarceration of political enemies. The climate of national emergency that the conflict granted to the Nazi leaders, however, permitted the SS to expand the functions of the camps.

The concentration camps increasingly became sites where the SS authorities could kill targeted groups of real or perceived enemies of Nazi Germany. They also came to serve as holding centers for a rapidly growing pool of forced laborers used for SS construction projects, SS-commissioned extractive industrial sites, and, by 1942, the production of armaments, weapons, and related goods for the German war effort.

Despite the need for forced labor, the SS authorities continued to deliberately undernourish and mistreat prisoners incarcerated in the concentration camps. Prisoners were used ruthlessly and without regard to safety at forced labor, resulting in high mortality rates.

Last Edited: Jun 27, 2019

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about early concentration camps the Nazi regime established in Germany, and the expansion of the camp system during the Holocaust and World War II.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
LONDON - Adolf Hitler did not wish to confront the reality of the Final Solution, a documentary on British television claimed on Monday night.

The program alleged the Nazi dictator never visited an extermination camp and pulled down the blinds of his Fuhrer train when a train carrying Jews to their deaths stopped on an adjacent platform.

It also stated that the origins of the Holocaust lay in remarks made by Hitler at a private dinner and noted the lack of a "paper trail" linking him directly to its instigation.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

"When it came to the extermination of Jews, Hitler was very hands off," presenter Dr. Tracy Borman stated in the documentary, entitled "Private Lives," which aired on Britain's Yesterday channel.

But doubt was immediately cast on the implication of some of the program's claims by one of Britain's leading experts on Nazi Germany, Prof. Sir Richard Evans.

In the show, Borman, the chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, examined Hitler's private life, attempting to show how it related to his public actions. Historic Royal Palaces is a charity which looks after some of the UK's most famous public buildings, including the Tower of London and Kensington Palace.

"While atrocities were being carried out in his name, he never visited an extermination camp," Borman said in the program. "When a train carrying Jews to the camps stopped on an adjacent platform to his Fuhrer train, he pulled down the blinds... Hitler never wanted to be confronted with the brutal reality of what was going on. He just wanted to know that it was being done."

However, Evans, former Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and the author of a number of books on the Third Reich, urged caution about some of these claims.

"It is true that Hitler did not visit any extermination camps, but he was sent, and read, the regular reports of the SS task forces who shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in pits behind the Eastern Front during the war," he noted.

"The incident recorded by [Albert] Speer in which Hitler had the blinds on his train windows pulled down was prompted by a trainload of German war wounded," Evans said. "Jews were transported for the most part in cattle trucks and would not have been visible from outside."

Evans was the principal expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving in Irving's unsuccessful 2000 libel suit against American historian Deborah Lipstadt. That case would be dramatized in the 2016 Hollywood movie "Denial," starring Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt.

The Yesterday channel documentary highlighted the lack of documents linking Hitler to the decision to order the Final Solution.

"When it comes to the instigation of the Holocaust, there is no paper trail leading directly to Hitler himself," Borman said. "Quite typically, these horrifying plans seems to have grown out of one of the Fuhrer's private chats at the dinner table."

Hitler is said to have told SS head Heinrich Himmler and Hans Lammer, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, over a dinner that he had been "extraordinarily merciful to the Jews," but he was coming to see that "the only solution was extermination."

A transcript of the conversation, historian Nigel Jones told the program, was "the only actual written link that we have that Hitler ordered the policy of the Holocaust."

Holocaust scholar Evans said, however, "There are many documents attesting to Hitler's knowledge of the extermination of the Jews, including the diaries of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels."

Goebbels confided in his diaries that Hitler was "pitiless" when it came to the "Jewish Question." Hitler believed that "The Jews must get out of Europe, if need be through [the] use of the most brutal means," the minister wrote on one occasion. On another, he argued that "the Fuhrer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution."

The one 'noble Jew'

The program noted that Hitler had, in fact, shown mercy to only one Jew, Eduard Bloch. A Linz-based doctor, Bloch treated Hitler's mother, Klara, when she was dying of breast cancer. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hitler awarded him special protection and he was allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1940.

Hitler called Bloch "the noble Jew," according to the documentary, and said, "If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question."

"Hitler's very private act of mercy towards Dr. Bloch was not to be repeated," Borman said.

The program also claimed that, as a child, Hitler was beaten by his father, Alois.

"His father had been a brutal, tyrannical man who tyrannized his entire family and beat Adolf [on a] fairly regular basis," Jones stated.

However, Evans argued: "The claim that [Hitler] had an abusive childhood is based on speculation; there is no evidence to suggest that his father was more violent than other fathers of the time."

The documentary painted a picture of Hitler as a lazy and arrogant student, who was embittered by his rejection by the prestigious Vienna Academy of Arts. It suggested that as a resentful vagrant living on the streets of Vienna he sold paintings, postcards and drawings, frequently through Jewish middlemen.

Decades later, Hitler's desire to rebuild German cities according to his own neo-classical architectural tastes were a "key driver of the concentration camp networks, the persecution of Jews and peoples of occupied territory and even of the course of war itself," Borman said in the program.

According to historian Jones, "Camps like Mauthausen in Austria and Flossenburg in Germany were built next to quarries where the stonework that would go into the building projects was actually dug out."

"We can draw a connection between Hitler's own love of architecture and his desire to build these grandiose constructions with the work that went on in concentration camps," said Jones.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UK documentary claims Hitler was 'very hands off' in implementing Final Solution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LONDON - Adolf Hitler did not wish to confront the reality of the Final Solution, a documentary on British television claimed on Monday night. The program alleged the Nazi dictator never visited an extermination camp and pulled down the blinds of his Fuhrer train when a train carrying Jews to their deaths stopped on an adjacent platform.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZS0YlpCS7I

# data[].attributes.body
Anne Frank

# data[].attributes.body
Anna Rado - Holocaust survivor
http://www.mesquite-news.com/holocaust-survivor-offers-testimony-to-history-students/

# data[].attributes.headline
UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE LAW, 1921–1980 Before World War II and the Holocaust, American law made very little distinction between refugees forced to flee their countries due to persecution, and immigrants seeking a better life. geographical and time limitations.

# data[].attributes.subject
UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE LAW, 1921–1980 Before World War II and the Holocaust, American law made very little distinction between refugees forced to flee their countries due to persecution, and immigrants seeking a better life. geographical and time limitations.

# data[].attributes.body
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/united-states-immigration-and-refugee-law-1921-1980