The Jews

Who were the Jewish victims?

In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews in the world. More than half of them lived in 21 European countries that Nazi forces subsequently occupied. During the war, two thirds of those Jews  – an estimated 5.1 million to 6.2 million – died through starvation, maltreatment and industrialised mass slaughter. Less than 11% of Jewish children in these occupied countries survived.

Before the war

Anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, extreme nationalism and militarism formed the platform on which the Nazis mobilised support in the late 1920s and early '30s as Germany suffered economic chaos and political instability. (For more insights, see Origins.)

The Nazis blamed the Jews for their World War I defeat even though 100,000 German Jews had served in the military and 12,000 had died as German patriots. They blamed Jews, too, for Germany's economic problems and for the spread of Communist ideas.

When the Nazis took power, Germany's 500,000 Jews (less than 1% of the population) comprised a long-established, integrated and influential community. Most German Jews lived in cities and worked mainly within business and the professions, especially journalism, law and medicine, although there were poorer Jews, primarily refugees from eastern Europe. Jewish individuals were prominent in political movements including the Communist Party. Hitler accused both Jewish capitalists and Jewish Communists of conspiring to undermine Germany's 'Aryan race'.

Nazi laws diminished the rights of Jews, impoverishing them and isolating them from the rest of German society. Emigration was actively encouraged.

The formal decision to exterminate European Jews was taken at the Wannsee conference in 1942, but genocidal intentions had been evident earlier. Nazi ideologues such as Julius Streicher, Hans Frank and Joseph Goebbels had frequently described Jews as vermin to be exterminated.

With the Austrian Anschluss in March 1938, Germany incorporated another 180,000 Jews; this number quickly fell as many were terrorised into emigrating. The remaining Austrian and German Jews suffered widespread attacks orchestrated by the Nazis, most famously on Kristallnacht – the 'night of broken glass'. Synagogues were burnt down, shops were looted and families terrorised. Concentration camps that initially housed only political opponents began to fill with Jews. All this was a prelude to a total war on Europe's Jews that would be enacted under the cover of Nazi military expansion.

During the war

World War II began when the Nazis invaded Poland, where 10% of the population was Jewish. Within a year, three million Polish Jews had been crammed into some 400 ghettoes, isolated from the general Polish population and used as slave labour for the German war effort. The overcrowded, insanitary conditions in the ghettoes became even worse when Jews from other European cities under Nazi occupation were transported there, too.

Inside the Soviet Union, the Nazis took more immediate measures. Einsatzgruppen – mobile killing units – followed the invading armies, rounding up local Jews and murdering them in their thousands in fields and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns and cities.

By 1942, the Nazis' desire to exterminate Europe's Jews in their entirety had exceeded any perceived utility of the Jews as slave labourers. Six extermination centres were built in semi-rural areas of occupied Poland close to railway lines. Deportation points were established in the ghettoes for transportation to these death camps, although the Jews were told that they were being deported further 'east' for work. At the extermination camps, mass murder was carried out using gas (first, carbon monoxide and then Zyklon B). The bodies, stripped of jewellery and gold teeth, were cremated.

Meanwhile, many other Jews were dying from the brutality, starvation and disease they endured in ghettoes and concentration camps.

A young Jewish activist in the Warsaw ghetto secretly boarded a deportation train and, helped by a non-Jewish Polish railway worker, discovered the deportees' fate. The Bund – a Jewish political organisation in the ghetto – clandestinely published this news and urged resistance, but most of the brutalised ghetto Jews refused to imagine anything worse than their current plight.

The rate of deportation increased, and by spring 1943, it was clear that the Nazis intended to destroy the Warsaw ghetto completely. Young Jews mounted a heroic resistance, and it took the Nazis a month to remove or kill as many of the remaining Jews that they could find, paying a heavy price in fatalities in the process. Word of the rebellion spread. The Nazis faced further uprisings in other ghettoes and camps, in addition to attacks by nationalist partisan groups who refused to collaborate with them.

Survivors

The Nazis were also thwarted by some of their allies. The governments of Finland, Norway and Bulgaria, even though pro-Nazi, were unenthusiastic about deporting their Jewish citizens.

A few brave diplomats – Raoul Wallenberg (Swedish), Ho Feng Shan (Chinese) and Aristides de Sousa Mendes (Portuguese) – used various deceptions to provide visas for Jews to neutral countries. In October 1943, Denmark's underground resistance spirited some 8,000 Jews to safety in Sweden in a daring clandestine operation. Other Jews survived by being hidden by non-Jews in Warsaw, Amsterdam and even in Vienna and Berlin. Also in Warsaw, some 2,000 Jews who had concealed themselves in underground hideouts after the ghetto had been destroyed were discovered when the city was liberated.

As the war turned against Germany, the Nazis evacuated the camps and tried to destroy any evidence of genocide. They forced the remaining skeletal inmates to walk dozens of miles to railway stations where they would embark for camps inside Germany. Many of them died during these 'death marches'.

In 1945, after the liberation, few survivors wanted to return to the places where their families and communities had been destroyed. However, the very countries that had defeated Hitler refused to accept Jewish refugees in substantial numbers. Many survivors endured the next few years in displaced person (DP) camps, some located on the very sites where the Nazis had previously incarcerated them. They eventually dispersed to North and South America, Palestine, western Europe, Australia and South Africa.

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