Throughout history Jews have faced prejudice and discrimination, known as antisemitism. In European societies where the population was primarily Christian, Jews found themselves increasingly isolated as outsiders. Jews do not share the Christian belief that Jesus is the Son of God, and many Christians considered this refusal to accept Jesus' divinity as arrogant. For centuries the Church taught that Jews were responsible for Jesus' death, not recognizing, as most historians do today, that Jesus was executed by the Roman government because officials viewed him as a political threat to their rule. Rulers placed restrictions on Jews, barring them from holding certain jobs and from owning land. At the same time, since the early Church did not permit usury (lending money at interest), Jews came to fill the vital (but unpopular) role of moneylenders for the Christian majority. In more desperate times, Jews became scapegoats for many problems people suffered. In Russia and Poland in the late 1800s the government organized or did not prevent violent attacks on Jewish neighborhoods, called pogroms, in which mobs murdered Jews and looted their homes and stores. As ideas of political equality and freedom spread in western Europe during the 1800s, Jews became almost equal citizens under the law. Some writers applied this argument to Jews, too, mistakenly defining Jews as a race of people called Semites who shared common blood and physical features. This kind of racial antisemitism meant that Jews remained Jews by race even if they converted to Christianity. He became Mayor of Vienna, Austria, at the end of the century through the use of antisemitism -- he appealed to voters by blaming Jews for bad economic times. Hitler's ideas, including his views of Jews, were shaped during the years he lived in Vienna, where he studied Lueger's tactics and the antisemitic newspapers and pamphlets that multiplied during Lueger's long rule.
1890s A CONCOCTED JEWISH CONSPIRACY In France, a member of the Russian secret police concocts the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These forged documents are presented as the minutes of a supposed meeting of world Jewish leaders in which they finalized plans to dominate the world, and suggest that Jews have formed secret organizations and agencies through which they aim to control and manipulate political parties, the economy, the press, and public opinion. The controversy surrounding the Dreyfus affair reflects latent antisemitism in the French officer corps and other conservative French groups.
APRIL 1897 KARL LUEGER, ANTISEMITIC MAYOR OF VIENNA Karl Lueger is elected mayor of Vienna. Adolf Hitler, a resident of Vienna during Lueger's mayoral reign, is greatly influenced both by Lueger's antisemitism and by his ability to rally public support.
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The Boycott of Jewish Businesses
In 1933, about 500,000 Jews lived in Germany, less than one percent of the total population. More than 100,000 German Jews had served in the German army during World War I, and many were decorated for bravery. Jews held important positions in government and taught in Germany's great universities. They spoke the German language and regarded Germany as their home. When the Nazis came to power, the lives of German Jews changed drastically. Nazi spokesmen claimed the boycott was an act of revenge against both German Jews and foreigners, including US and English journalists, who had criticized the Nazi regime. Signs were posted saying "Don't Buy from Jews" and "The Jews Are Our Misfortune." The nationwide boycott was not very successful and lasted just a day, but it marked the beginning of a nationwide campaign by the Nazi party against the entire German Jewish population. Jewish government workers, including teachers in public schools and universities were fired.
MARCH 1933 SA REIGN OF TERROR AGAINST JEWS THROUGHOUT GERMANY The SA (Storm Troopers) attack Jewish-owned department stores in German cities in an attempt to segregate Jews from the rest of society. In response, the Nazis organize a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany, blaming Jews for anti-German tone of the international press.
APRIL 1, 1933 NATIONWIDE BOYCOTT OF JEWISH-OWNED BUSINESSES At 10:00 a.m., SA and SS members stand in front of Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany to inform the public that the proprietors of these establishments are Jewish. The word "Jude," German for "Jew," is often smeared on store display windows, with a Star of David painted in yellow and black across the doors. The official boycott ends at midnight.
APRIL 7, 1933 LAW DISMISSES JEWS FROM CIVIL SERVICE The Nazi government enacts the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.
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The Nuremberg Race Laws
Ancillary ordinances to the laws disenfranchised Jews and deprived them of most political rights. The Nuremberg Laws, as they became known, did not define a "Jew" as someone with particular religious beliefs. Instead, anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was defined as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community. Such a loss would have been a serious blow to German prestige. After the Olympic Games (in which the Nazis did not allow German Jewish athletes to participate), the Nazis again stepped up the persecution of German Jews. Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jews, and Jewish lawyers were not permitted to practice law. Like everyone in Germany, Jews were required to carry identity cards, but the government added special identifying marks to theirs: a red "J" stamped on them and new middle names for all those Jews who did not possess recognizably "Jewish" first names -- "Israel" for males, "Sara" for females. Such cards allowed the police to identify Jews easily.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1935 NUREMBERG LAWS ARE INSTITUTED At their annual party rally, the Nazis announce new laws that revoke Reich citizenship for Jews and prohibit Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or related blood." Consequently, the Nazis classify as Jews thousands of people who had converted from Judaism to another religion, among them even Roman Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant ministers whose grandparents were Jewish.
OCTOBER 18, 1935 NEW MARRIAGE REQUIREMENTS INSTITUTED The "Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People" requires all prospective marriage partners to obtain from the public health authorities a certificate of fitness to marry.
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The Ghettos
Life in the ghettos was usually unbearable. Some residents had some money or valuables they could trade for food smuggled into the ghetto; tens of thousands died in the ghettos from illness, starvation, or cold. Small children in the Warsaw ghetto sometimes helped smuggle food to their families and friends by crawling through narrow openings in the ghetto wall. They did so at great risk, as smugglers who were caught were severely punished. Many young people tried to continue their education by attending school classes organized by adults in many ghettos. In the Lodz ghetto, children turned the tops of empty cigarette boxes into playing cards.
FEBRUARY 8, 1940 LODZ JEWS ORDERED INTO GHETTO The Germans order the establishment of a ghetto in the northeastern section of Lodz. The Lodz ghetto is separated from the rest of the city by barbed-wire fencing. The ghetto area is divided into three parts by the intersection of two major roads, which are excluded from the ghetto. Streetcars for the non-Jewish population of Lodz traverse the ghetto but are not permitted to stop within it. Hard labor, overcrowding, and starvation are the dominant features of life.
JANUARY 16, 1942 LODZ JEWS DEPORTED TO CHELMNO KILLING CENTER Deportations from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno killing center begin. By September 1942, over 70,000 Jews and about 5,000 Roma (Gypsies) will have been deported to Chelmno, where they are killed in mobile gas vans (trucks with hermetically sealed compartments that serve as gas chambers).
JUNE 23, 1944
GERMANS RESUME DEPORTATIONS FROM LODZ GHETTO Between September 1942 and May 1944, there are no major deportations from Lodz. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis decide to destroy the Lodz ghetto. By then, Lodz is the last remaining ghetto in Poland, with a population of about 75,000 Jews. most of the remaining ghetto population is deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The Lodz ghetto is eliminated.
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Mobile Killing Squads
Some residents of the occupied regions, mostly Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, aided these German mobile killing squads by serving as auxiliary police.
The mobile killing units acted swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise. Then the killing squad members marched their victims to open fields, forests, and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns and cities.There they shot them or gassed them in gas vans and dumped the bodies into mass graves.On September 21, 1941, the eve of the Jewish New Year, a mobile killing squad entered Ejszyszki, a small town in what is now Lithuania. The killing squad members herded 4,000 Jews from the town and the surrounding region into three synagogues, where they were held for two days without food or water. Then, in two days of killing, Jewish men, women, and children were taken to cemeteries, lined up in front of open pits, and shot to death. The rich culture of most of these Jewish communities was lost forever.The killing squads murdered more than a million Jews and tens of thousands of other innocent people. In addition, when they described their actions they used code words like "special treatment" and "special action" instead of "killing" or "murder" to distance themselves from their terrible crimes.
JUNE 22, 1941
KILLING SQUADS DEPLOYED AGAINST JEWS
German mobile killing squads, called special duty units (Einsatzgruppen), are assigned to kill Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union. At first, the mobile killing squads shoot primarily Jewish men. Soon, wherever the mobile killing squads go they shoot all Jewish men, women, and children, without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, the mobile killing squads will have killed more than a million Jews and tens of thousands of partisans, Roma (Gypsies), and Soviet political officials.
SEPTEMBER 29-30, 1941
ABOUT 34,000 JEWS KILLED AT BABI YAR
The Germans order the Jewish residents of Kiev to assemble on Melnik Street for resettlement outside the city. Many non-Jews, including Roma (Gypsies) and Soviet prisoners of war, are also killed in the ravine.
DECEMBER 1, 1941
A KILLING SQUAD COMMANDER REPORTS 137,346 KILLED
In the so-called "Jaeger Report," SS Colonel Karl Jaeger reports on the killings his unit carried out in Lithuania between July 2 and December 1, 1941. He reports that his squad killed 137,346 Jewish men, women, and children.
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Concentration Camps
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. In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo (the German secret state police) until 1936. After the SS gained its independence from the SA in July 1934, in the wake of the Röhm purge, Hitler authorized the Reich SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, to centralize the administration of the concentration camps and formalize them into a system. 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, though local civilian authorities continued to establish and manage forced-labor camps and detention camps throughout Germany. After the creation of the “SS Death's-Head Division” of the Waffen SS in 1940, whose officers had been recruited from concentration camp service, members of this division 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 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. EXPANSION OF THE CAMP SYSTEM 1939
As Nazi Germany expanded by bloodless conquest between 1938 and 1939, the numbers of those labeled as political opponents and social deviants 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. From as early as early as 1934, concentration camp commandants deployed prisoners as forced laborers for the benefit of SS construction projects, including the construction or expansion of the camps themselves. 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 would become typical after the war began, economic considerations had an increasing impact on the selection of sites for concentration camps after 1937. Likewise, concentration camp authorities increasingly diverted prisoners from meaningless, backbreaking labor to more goal-oriented if still backbreaking and dangerous labor in extractive industries, such as stone quarries and coal mines, and construction labor. After Nazi Germany unleashed World War II in September 1939, vast new territorial conquests and larger groups of potential prisoners inspired the rapid expansion of the concentration camp system to the east. 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 expanding pool of forced laborers deployed on SS construction projects, SS-commissioned extractive industrial sites, and, by 1942, in the production of armaments, weapons, and related goods for the German war effort. Despite the chronic need for forced labor, the SS authorities continued to deliberately undernourish and mistreat prisoners incarcerated in the concentration camps, deploying them so ruthlessly and without regard to safety at forced labor, with such rates of mortality that many prisoners believed that they were in effect being "annihilated through work."
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Denmark Resists
In many places, providing shelter to Jews was a crime punishable by death.
In spite of the risks, a small number of individuals refused to stand by and watch.These people had the courage to help by providing hiding places, underground escape routes, false papers, food, clothing, money, and sometimes even weapons. Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime's attempts to deport its Jewish citizens. On September 28, 1943, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a German diplomat, secretly informed the Danish resistance that the Nazis were planning to deport the Danish Jews. Warned of the German plans, Jews began to leave Copenhagen, where most of the almost 8,000 Jews in Denmark lived, and other cities, by train, car, and on foot. Within a two-week period fishermen helped ferry some 7,200 Danish Jews and 680 non-Jewish family members to safety across the narrow body of water separating Denmark from Sweden. The Danish rescue effort was unique because it was nationwide. Almost 500 Danish Jews were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Yet even of these Jews, all but 51 survived the Holocaust, largely because Danish officials pressured the Germans with their concerns for the well-being of those who had been deported. The Danes proved that widespread support for Jews and resistance to Nazi policies could save lives. There are numerous stories of brave people in other countries who also tried to save the Jews from perishing at the hands of the Nazis. Some Jews were even hidden in the Warsaw Zoo by the zoo's director, Jan Zabinski.
AUGUST 29, 1943 DANISH GOVERNMENT RESIGNS The Germans occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940. The Danes respond with a nationwide rescue operation.
OCTOBER 2, 1943 SWEDEN OFFERS ASYLUM TO JEWS OF DENMARK In a report to German officials in Berlin, the Swedish government offers asylum to some 7,000 Jews in Denmark. At the end of September 1943, the German plan to arrest and deport Danish Jews is leaked to Danish authorities who warn the Jewish population in Denmark and urge them to go into hiding. In response, the Danish underground and general population spontaneously organize a nationwide effort to smuggle Jews to the coast where Danish fisherman ferry them to Sweden. Despite the Danish efforts, some 500 Jews are arrested by the Germans and deported to Theresienstadt ghetto.
JUNE 23, 1944 DANISH DELEGATION VISITS THERESIENSTADT A Danish delegation joins representatives of the International Red Cross on a visit to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Bohemia. Out of the some 500 Danish Jews deported, about 450 survive.
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The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Many Jews in ghettos across eastern Europe tried to organize resistance against the Germans and to arm themselves with smuggled and homemade weapons. In January 1943, Warsaw ghetto fighters fired upon German troops as they tried to round up another group of ghetto inhabitants for deportation. This small victory inspired the ghetto fighters to prepare for future resistance. On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to camps.
JULY 28, 1942 JEWISH FIGHTING ORGANIZATION ESTABLISHED In the midst of the first wave of deportations from Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp, the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) is established. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto prepare to fight to the end.
MAY 16, 1943 GHETTO DESTROYED, UPRISING ENDS After a month of fighting, the Germans blow up the Great Synagogue in Warsaw, signaling the end of the uprising and the destruction of the ghetto. On April 19, 1943, the Germans under the command of SS General Juergen Stroop, began the final destruction of the ghetto and the deportation of the remaining Jews. Although there are only about 50,000 Jews left in the ghetto after the January 1943 deportations, General Stroop reports after the destruction of the ghetto that 56,065 Jews have been captured;
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The War Refugee Board
It was not until late in the war that the United States attempted to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. During the war the State Department had insisted that the best way to save victims of Nazi Germany’s policies was to win the war as quickly as possible. The War Refugee Board worked with Jewish organizations, diplomats from neutral countries, and resistance groups in Europe to rescue Jews from occupied territories and provide relief to inmates of Nazi concentration camps. Wallenberg also set up hospitals, nurseries, and soup kitchens for the Jews of Budapest. The War Refugee Board played a crucial role in the rescue of as many as 200,000 Jews. Ten years later, the Soviet Union admitted that he had been arrested and claimed that he died in prison in 1947.
JANUARY 13, 1944 UNITED STATES TAKES ACTION As more and more reports of mass killings of Europe’s Jews are publicized in 1943 and early 1944, the United States government comes under increasing pressure to heighten rescue efforts in Europe. Fort Ontario was the only attempt of the United States to provide a haven for refugees on US territory during World War II.
JULY 9, 1944 RAOUL WALLENBERG IN BUDAPEST Raoul Wallenberg, a diplomat from neutral Sweden, arrives in Budapest on assignment from the Swedish legation and the War Refugee Board to aid in the rescue and relief of Jews in Budapest. In November 1944, when the Germans begin a death march of Jews from Budapest to labor camps in Austria, Wallenberg pursues the march and removes Jews with protective papers and returns them to safe houses in Budapest.
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The Wannsee Conference and the "Final Solution"
On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders gathered for an important meeting. Reinhard Heydrich, who was SS chief Heinrich Himmler's head deputy, held the meeting for the purpose of discussing the "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" with key non-SS government leaders, including the secretaries of the Foreign Ministry and Justice, whose cooperation was needed. The "final solution" was the Nazis' code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction, or genocide, of all European Jews. The Nazis used the vague term "final solution" to hide their policy of mass murder from the rest of the world. In fact, the men at Wannsee talked about methods of killing, about liquidation, about "extermination." The Wannsee Conference, as it became known to history, did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people.
JUNE 22, 1941 KILLINGS ACCOMPANY GERMAN INVASION OF SOVIET UNION German special duty units, called mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen), are assigned to kill Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union. At first, the mobile killing squads shoot primarily Jewish men. Soon, wherever the mobile killing squads go they shoot all Jewish men, women, and children, without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, the mobile killing squads will have killed more than a million Jews and tens of thousands of partisans, Roma (Gypsies), and Soviet political commissars.
SEPTEMBER 3, 1941 EXPERIMENTAL GASSINGS BEGIN AT AUSCHWITZ Experimental gassings are carried out at the gas chamber in Auschwitz I, the main camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland. 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 ill or weak prisoners are forced into an experimental gas chamber. The Germans test the killing potential of Zyklon B gas. The "success" of these experiments leads to the adoption of Zyklon B as the killing agent for the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Mass killings begin there in January 1942.
DECEMBER 8, 1941 CHELMNO KILLING CENTER BEGINS OPERATION Chelmno is located about 30 miles northwest of Lodz. Once the carbon monoxide kills all those locked inside, the van is driven to mass graves and emptied. Three gas vans operate at Chelmno, and at least 152,000 people will be killed there by mid-July 1944.
