THE HOLOCAUST 135
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The Nazi rise to power had immediate consequences for Germany’s
Jews, who were treated from the start as racial outcasts. From 1935
onward they were denied citizenship and forbidden to marry or
have sexual relations with people of “German blood.” The policy
was deliberately aimed at encouraging Jews to flee the country,
and by 1938 about half the Jewish population had done just that.
With the outbreak of war, the situation deteriorated further.
Ghettos were created in the occupied eastern lands where
deportees could be resettled and controlled. During the drive
eastward many Jewish populations were massacred, often in
retaliation for isolated acts of resistance. From late 1941, new
extermination centers were constructed—known as Operation
Reinhard camps—where Jews were sent to the gas chambers or
selected for grueling slave labor, through which thousands more
were worked to death. The results were horrifying: when liberation
finally came, an estimated two-thirds of Europe’s pre-war Jewish
population had been wiped out.
“The Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy,
but also a human tragedy.”
SIMON WIESENTHAL, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
△ Children at Auschwitz
This photograph was taken by Soviet troops
who liberated the Auschwitz concentration
camp in January 1945.
THE
HOLOCAUST
Hitler and his supporters saw the Jews as a worldwide
enemy conspiring to undermine the German nation.
The Nazi regime embarked on what became known as
the Holocaust—the systematic persecution and murder
of around six million European Jews.
LIBERATION OF THE CAMPS 1944–1945
As the tide of war swung against Germany, the
pace of killings increased: in two months in 1944,
almost half a million Hungarian Jews were sent
to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Then, with the Soviet
advance into Poland, came a time when survivors
were shuttled from camp to camp in a series of
death marches. The first camp to be liberated
was Majdanek, in July 1944; Auschwitz followed
in January 1945. In total, around 2.7 million Jews
from Poland were killed, along with 2.1 million
from the Soviet Union, and 1.3 million from the
rest of occupied Europe.
4
OTHER PERSECUTED MINORITIES
Jews were not the only minority
group persecuted by the Nazis.
Their victims stretched from
homosexual men and people
with disabilities to Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Freemasons, and
Catholic and Protestant
dissidents. In terms of numbers,
ethnic groups suffered the worst
losses. Romani people faced the
same genocidal threat as the
Jews, while the Nazi assault
on the Slavic peoples ended in
the deaths of some 15 million
Soviets and 3 million Poles.
Sep 29–30, 1941 German
soldiers shoot 34,000 Jews
in the Babi Yar ravine in
Kiev, Ukraine.
Oct 22–24, 1941
30,000 Jews are massacred in
the Black Sea port of Odessa,
then under Romanian control.
Roma and Sinti women
at Bergen-Belsen
US_134-135_The_Holocaust.indd 135 20/03/19 3:55 PM