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The Starting
The Holocaust refers to the period when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany to when the war in Europe officially ended. During this time, Jews in Europe were subjected to progressively harsher persecution that ultimately led to the murder of 6,000,000 Jews (1.5 million of these being children), and the destruction of 5,000 Jewish communities. These deaths represented two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of all war. -
Concentration Camps
The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. -
Smelly
The camps had gas chambers to kill the young and old prisoners and factories to work them to death. Doctors performed crude experiments on the prisoners and etched their skin with prison numbers. The crematorium was about two miles from us, and if the wind was in the right direction, we got the awful smell of burning bodies — it was a very sickly smell. When the Jews came up the following morning, we asked where the rest of them had gone. They replied they had gone for a “shower”. -
Germans
The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler's Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. Its results, Professor Gellately says, destroy the claim - generally made by Germans after Berlin fell in 1945 and accepted by most historians - that they did not know about camp atrocities. He concludes by indicating that the only thing many Germans may not have know -
Children
Young children were particularly targeted by the Nazis to be murdered during the Holocaust. They posed a unique threat because if they lived, they would grow up to parent a new generation of Jews. Many children suffocated in the crowded cattle cars on the way to the camps. Those who survived were immediately taken to the gas chambers. -
Jews
Many of those who survived were determined to leave Europe and start new lives in Israel or the United States. The population shifts brought on by the Holocaust and by Jewish emigration were astounding. 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. In 1933, 60 percent of all Jews lived in Europe. In 1950, most Jews (51 percent) lived in the Americas (North and South combine -
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945 was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party. He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. Hitler was at the centre of Nazi Germany, World War II in Europe, and the Holocaust. Hitler committed suicide at the end of April in 1945. -
Gas Chambers
The Nazis began experimenting with poison gas for the purpose of mass murder in late 1939 with the killing of mental patients ("euthanasia"). A Nazi euphemism, "euthanasia" referred to the systematic killing of those Germans whom the Nazis deemed "unworthy of life" because of mental illness or physical disability. -
Traveling
Deportation and transportation to camps often took days. Individuals, families and whole communities together with their personal belongings were packed into cattle trucks. They were locked in and transported for days. They had no information on where they were traveling. They did not know where they were going, the length of the journey or what would happen to them when they eventually arrived at their destination.
The conditions on the journey were appalling. -
Jews in Hiding
Even before the Holocaust, Jewish people -- in particular European Jews -- had to flee their homelands due to discrimination and anti-Semitism. They most often emigrated to Palestine, the United States, and England. A small number also went to other countries such as Argentina and South Africa. Hiding a child was much less difficult than hiding an adult. Unlike adults, children were not required to carry any forms of identification. In addition, they could easily blend in with the groups of -
The Ending
In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches." As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German armed forces surrended.
