Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on July 17, 2015

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust, says that: "The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II."[1] While the term Holocaust victims generally refers to the victims of a systematic genocide against the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, the Nazis systematically murdered a large number of non-Jewish people that were considered subhuman (Untermenschen) or undesirable. The non-Jewish (gentile) victims of the Holocaust included: Poles, Ukrainians, Slavs, Serbs, Romanis (often known in the English-speaking world by the ethnonym gypsies), lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans individuals (LGBTs);[a]mentally or physically disabled people;[b]Soviet POWs, Roman Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses,[c]Spanish Republicans, Freemasons,[d]people of color (especially African-German mischlinge, who Hitler and the Nazi regime called the "Rhineland Bastards"); the Deaf, leftists, Communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, anarchists, and every other minority or dissident that wasn't considered part of the Aryan race or Herrenvolk ("master race").[e][2][3]

Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically killed an estimated 6 million Jews and mass murdered an additional 11 million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths would produce a death toll of 17 million.[4]

Despite often widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide, while others were not), these victims all perished alongside one another, some in concentration camps such as Dachau and, some as victims of other forms of Nazi brutality, but most in death camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to the extensive documentation left behind by the Nazis themselves (both written and photographed), eyewitness testimony (by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders) and the statistical records of the various countries under occupation.

The paramilitary campaign to remove certain classes of persons but above all, Jews from Germany and other German-held territories during the Second World War, often using methods of extreme brutality, is commonly known as the Holocaust. The Holocaust was carried out primarily by German forces and certain collaborative persons, both German and otherwise. As the war started, millions of Jews were concentrated in ghettos. In 1941, massacres of Jews took place and by December Hitler had decided to exterminate all of the Jews living in Europe at that time. In all, more than 30% of the Jews in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust. The world's Jewish population was reduced by a third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946.[5] Even sixty years later, there are still fewer Jews in the world today than there were prior to 1940.[6]

In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (Endlsung der Judenfrage). Dr. Josef Bhler, the State Secretary for the Central Government, urged Reinhard Heydrich, the conference chairman, to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibr and Treblinka. The author Sebastian Haffner, published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler, from December 1941, accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe on his declaration of war against the United States, and that his withdrawal thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goalthe extermination of the Jews.[7] Even as the Nazi war machine faltered in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still being diverted away from the war towards the death camps.

Poland, home of the largest Jewish community in the world before the war, had 3,000,000 (90%) of its Jewish population killed. The Germans had issued the death penalty for hiding Jews and this law was carried out fully. Some Poles hid Jews and saved their lives despite the risk to them and their own families. Although detailed reports on the Holocaust had reached western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of genocidal mass murder of Jews in Poland was extremely poor at the time; the first references in The New York Times in 1942 were not front-page news, these articles were more in the nature of unconfirmed reports.

Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Latvia each had over 70% of their Jewish population destroyed. Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia lost around 50% of their Jews, the Soviet Union over one third; even countries such as France and Italy had each seen around 25% of their Jewish population killed. Denmark was able to evacuate almost all of its Jews to nearby Sweden, which was neutral during the war. The Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many ordinary Danish citizens, managed to evacuate 7,220 of Denmark's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden (a neutral country),[8] using everything from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis.[8] Some Jews outside Europe under Nazi occupation were also affected by the Holocaust, such as in Italian Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Japan, and China.

Although Jews are an ethnoreligious group, Jews were defined by the Nazis purely on racial grounds. The Nazi party regarded Jewish religion as irrelevant and persecuted Jews on antisemitic stereotypes, and put it down to what they perceived to be biologically determined heritage that drove the Jewish race. While it defined Jews as the main enemy, Nazi racial ideology was used against other persecuted minorities.[9]

The Nazi genocide of Romani people was ignored by scholars until the 1980s; opinions continue to differ on its details. Historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia write that the genocide of the Romani began later than the genocide of the Jews and that a smaller proportion was killed.[10] Hitler's campaign of genocide against the Romani population of Europe involved an application of Nazi "racial hygiene" (a type of selective breeding for humans). Despite discriminatory measures, some Romani groups, including some of the Sinti and Lalleri of Germany, were spared deportation and death, the remaining Romani groups suffered much like the Jews. Romani were deported to the Jewish ghettos, shot by SS Einsatzgruppen in their villages or deported and gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.

Estimates of the death toll of Romani people in World War II range from 220,000 to 1,500,000.[11] The genocide of the Roma was formally recognised by West Germany in 1982 and by Poland in 2011.[12]

See more here:
Holocaust victims - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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