[163] Christopher Browning reports that on 1 August 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade passed an order to its units: "Explicit order by RF-SS [Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfhrer-SS]. See here for details. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. [406] Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or serve in the military, Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 Genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany, "Holocaust" and "Shoah" redirect here. One of the most disturbing revelations, the survey noted, is that 11 percent of respondents believe Jews caused the. Approximately 98 percent of Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust were killed. By the end of April 1941 the Ustae required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David[136] and started confiscating Jewish property in October 1941. "[374] At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate "all leading elements in Poland". Holocaust Memorial Museum. After the United States entry into the war, it was banned from sending relief into German-occupied Europe, but continued to do so. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms from the summer of 1941. Their percentage among the general population - about 10% - was also the highest in Europe.After the conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, most of the Jews remaining within the area occupied by Germany - approximately 1 Murder of the Jews of Poland Skip to main content Accessibility High contrast There was discussion about whether to include the German Mischlinge (half-Jews). By Raoul Wootliff 31 December 2015, 12:17 pm. Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 19181947. By contrast, more atheists and agnostics than Jews correctly answer the question about how Hitler became chancellor of Germany: Three-quarters of atheists (76%) and seven-in-ten agnostics know Hitler became chancellor through a democratic political process, compared with 57% of Jews. [235], The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("Ausweichmglichkeiten"). Types and Numbers of Nazi Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 Estimated Deaths from Nazi Violence during World War II (by Group) Estimated Number of Prisoners and Survivors (by Extermination Camps) As the method of widespread execution was shooting rather than gas chamber, the Holocaust in the Soviet Union is sometimes referred to as the Holocaust by bullets. [81] Many were released within weeks; by early 1939, 2,000 remained in the camps. [425], The government of Israel requested $1.5billion from the Federal Republic of Germany in March 1951 to finance the rehabilitation of 500,000 Jewish survivors, arguing that Germany had stolen $6billion from the European Jews. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Prewar estimates for the latest year available (1937-1941). Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, or 4.1million. [101] The inhabitants had to pay for food and other supplies by selling whatever goods they could produce. Most of the people surveyed (10,429) were members of Pew Research Centers American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel. From August 1941 they began to murder women and children too. Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% say that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed. [98] These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. [296] Around 1,000 poorly armed fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks. [313] An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 joined the Soviet partisan movement. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW [207] Most Italian Jews, over 40,000, survived the Holocaust. Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. The, Germany after World War I, Hitler's world view, Dictatorship and repression (January 1933), German annexation of Austria (12 March 1938), Invasion of the Soviet Union (22 June 1941), Pearl Harbor, Germany declares war on the United States. [351] The British 11th Armoured Division found around 60,000 prisoners (90 percent Jews) when they liberated Bergen-Belsen,[347][352] as well as 13,000 unburied corpses; another 10,000 people died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks. [378] Others died in massacres or in revolts such as the Warsaw Uprising, where 150,000200,000 were killed. [169], During the war, around 15 million people were imprisoned at more than 40,000 distinct detention sites established by the Nazi authorities; about forty percent survived. And while all three studies included an open-ended question asking respondents to describe in their own words what the Holocaust refers to, the responses were not necessarily coded using the same criteria. [383][384] The New York Times reported on 21 December that year: "400,000 Germans to be sterilized". [91], The Wehrmacht in Poland was accompanied by seven SS Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolitizei ("special task forces of the Security Police") and an Einsatzkommando, numbering 3,000 men in all, whose role was to deal with "all anti-German elements in hostile country behind the troops in combat". Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. Archived from the original on 22 June 2006. By the outbreak of war in September 1939 however, according to some estimates, as many as 126,445 Jews had departed Austria. [45] Nazi policies divided the population into two groups: the Volksgenossen ("national comrades") who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft, and the Gemeinschaftsfremde ("community aliens") who did not. [96][k] From 1 December, Jews were required to wear Star of David armbands. Those present included (annotated, left to right): Frank continued by discussing their deportation, then asked: "But what is to happen to the Jews? What Do Americans Know About the Holocaust? American Jewish Committee. [325], During the war the Joint Distribution Committee raised $70 million and in the years after the war it raised $300 million. The Jews of Germany were a mere one percent, but to Hitler and his followers, that was one percent too many. There were also dedicated killing centers, where the deaths were estimated at 20,000, according to Georg Renno, deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers, or 400,000, according to Frank Zeireis, commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp. [314] One of the famous Jewish groups was the Bielski partisans in Belarus, led by the Bielski brothers. [203] Instead, Jews native to Bulgaria were sent to the provinces. Emigration from the Reich was ultimately banned in October 1941. [363] The death rates decreased when the POWs were needed to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million had been deployed as slave labor. On 910 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria on what became known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). [396][397] Research cited by Ian Hancock suggests the pre-war Romani population of Europe may have been much higher, resulting in estimates of up to 1.5 million Roma deaths. Yad Vashem. Through song, words, and candle-lighting, those in the Erie Jewish Community and supporters, memorialized the six million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust. "[164], Two years later, in a speech on 6 October 1943 to party leaders, Heinrich Himmler said he had ordered that women and children be shot, but according to Peter Longerich and Christian Gerlach, the murder of women and children began at different times in different areas, suggesting local influence. A copy was among the records captured by the US Army in 1945. [48] One of the first, at Dachau, opened on 22 March 1933. [80], Between 9 and 16 November, 30,000 Jews were sent to the Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. [57] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. [50] Other early prisons were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS. Rosenberg's vision of a secretive Jewish conspiracy ruling the world would influence Hitler's views of Jews by making them the driving force behind communism. [67] The SS and SA smashed shops and stole cars belonging to Jews; Austrian police stood by, some already wearing swastika armbands. View the list of all donors. Similarly, an overwhelming majority of agnostics (87%), Jews (86%) and atheists (84%) know that ghettos were parts of a town or city where Jews were forced to live. The 2018 Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study was administered mostly by interviewers over the phone, but also included some interviews administered online. The European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era (19331945),[8] in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of others, including ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, the Roma, the disabled, political and religious dissidents, and gay men. [184], At the end of 1937, the government of Octavian Goga came to power, Romania thus becoming the second overtly antisemitic state in Europe. Once the invasion was underway, however, about 100,000 Jews fled Kyiv or were conscripted into the Red Army. Even after the Reformation, Catholicism and Lutheranism continued to persecute Jews, accusing them of blood libels and subjecting them to pogroms and expulsions. [82] German Jewry was held collectively responsible for restitution of the damage; they also had to pay an "atonement tax" of over a billion Reichsmark. [282] At Auschwitz, the bodies were at first buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, 100,000 bodies were dug up and burned. For example, college graduates get an average of 2.8 out of the four multiple-choice questions right, while those whose formal education ended with high school correctly answer 1.7 questions. [324] The Polish government-in-exile's response to the Holocaust has polarized historiography, with some historians arguing that it did more than any other Allied government and others criticizing perceived indifference to the Jewish plight. [365][pageneeded] Filimoshin estimated that civilian forced laborer deaths in Germany totaled 2.1million. These are among the key findings of a survey conducted online Feb. 4 to 19, 2019, among 10,971 respondents. These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II. Both the online survey panels used as a basis for this study recruited panelists by phone or mail via random sampling to ensure that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. [289] Stone writes that "many European states, under the extreme circumstances of World War II, took upon themselves the task of solving the 'Jewish question' in their own way. After Belgium's surrender, the country was ruled by a German military governor, Alexander von Falkenhausen, who enacted anti-Jewish measures against its 90,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Germany or Eastern Europe. [b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; [c] around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. Several resistance groups were formed, such as the Jewish Combat Organization (OB) and Jewish Military Union (ZW) in the Warsaw Ghetto and the United Partisan Organization in Vilna. [269], Christian Gerlach writes that over three million Jews were murdered in 1942, the year that "marked the peak" of the mass murder. Other camps sometimes described as extermination camps include Maly Trostinets near Minsk in the occupied Soviet Union, where 65,000 are thought to have been murdered, mostly by shooting but also in gas vans;[258] Mauthausen in Austria;[259] Stutthof, near Gdask, Poland;[260] and Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrck in Germany. p. 281. A controversial ultra-Orthodox rabbi based in New York has said that fewer that one million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, claiming most of those . "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion". [132][133][134] In August 1942 Serbia was declared free of Jews,[135] after the Wehrmacht and German police, assisted by collaborators of the Nedi government and others such as Zbor, a pro-Nazi and pan-Serbian fascist party, had murdered nearly the entire population of 17,000 Jews. On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Jews made up some 10 percent of the young country's population and approximately one-third of the residents of the capital city, Warsaw. Liraz Lachmanovich. ", "Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945", "Shoah: How a Biblical Term Became the Hebrew Word for Holocaust", "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", "Senior Management Team: Dr. Michael Gray, Academic and Universities Director", "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution", "Antisemitic Austrian election poster by Bernd Steiner", "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto", "Jewish Losses during the Holocaust: By Country", "Einsatzgruppe member kills a Jewish woman and her child near Ivangorod, Ukraine, 1942". [350] The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 3 May, days before the Soviets arrived. "[219] In the view of Christian Gerlach, Hitler "announced his decision in principle" to annihilate the Jews on or around 12 December 1941, one day after his declaration of war. [359], The Nazis regarded the Slavs as Untermenschen (non-Aryan inferior people). "[60], On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, known as the Nuremberg Laws. The ascendance of Germany enabled Romania to disregard the minorities treaties that were imposed upon the country after the First World War. Recruiting panelists this way gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (watch our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling). [53] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. [46], Before and after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against opponents,[47] setting up concentration camps for extrajudicial imprisonment. [231], Translation, Avalon Project: "These actions are, however, only to be considered provisional, but practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question."[235]. Known as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"), the pogrom on 910 November 1938 saw over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) looted and attacked, and over 1,000 synagogues damaged or destroyed. [54] On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which excluded Jews and other "non-Aryans" from the civil service. Instead, it was a question of "a process of increasingly radical interpretations of orders". [237] According to Longerich, "the Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of forced labour and mass murder."[239]. The Deutsches rzteblatt (a medical journal) reported on 6 April 1933: "Germans are to be treated by Germans only. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945. Germany implemented the persecution in stages. 1.32 Million Jews Were Killed in Just Three Months During the Holocaust. According to the Pew study, which polled 10,971 US adults in February 2019, just 45% of US adults know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. [56] In Silesia, in March 1933, a group of men entered the courthouse and beat up Jewish lawyers; Friedlnder writes that, in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of courtrooms during trials. Read more about the ATPs methodology and the methodology for this report. [213], Stone writes that Slovakia, led by Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso (president of the Slovak State, 19391945), was "one of the most loyal of the collaborationist regimes". Like adults, more teens know when the Holocaust occurred (57%) and what Nazi-created ghettos were (53%) than know how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust (38%) or how Hitler became chancellor of Germany (33%). So many died that the marches were stopped. In 1993, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) published the results of a study regarding what U.S. adults and students in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades knew about the Holocaust.4 And in 2018, the Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study, conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, asked American adults many of the same questions that were discussed in the 1993 report. [387], In October 1939 Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of Hitler's Chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out a program of involuntary euthanasia. That said, respondents who get more questions right also tend to express warmer feelings toward Jews. Yad Vashem. According to Haaretz, the writer Yehuda Erez may have been the first to describe events in Germany as the shoah. [83] Kristallnacht marked the end of any sort of public Jewish activity and culture, and Jews stepped up their efforts to leave the country. The four multiple-choice questions also were included in a separate survey of approximately 1,800 U.S. teens (ages 13 to 17). German units conducted those operations with an ideologically driven and willful disregard for civilian life. [76] At least 90 Jews were murdered. "In mid-March 1942, some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 . Overall, the teens display lower levels of knowledge about the Holocaust than their elders do. sfn error: no target: CITEREFGoldsteinGoldstein2016 (. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. [233] Written by Eichmann and stamped "Top Secret", the minutes were written in "euphemistic language" on Heydrich's instructions, according to Eichmann's later testimony.[234]. Discussing plans for a "final solution to the Jewish question" ("Endlsung der Judenfrage"), and a "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" ("Endlsung der europischen Judenfrage"),[235] the conference was held to coordinate efforts and policies ("Parallelisierung der Linienfhrung"), and to ensure that authority rested with Heydrich. [309] By the time the SS had regained control, 451 members of the Sonderkommando were dead; 212 survived. [435] Yom HaShoah became Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1951. [126] Adolf Eichmann's office was ordered to investigate the option, but no evidence of planning exists until after the defeat of France in June 1940. The single most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to document numbers of victims of the Holocaust is that no one master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world. [149], Typically, victims would undress and give up their valuables before lining up beside a ditch to be shot, or they would be forced to climb into the ditch, lie on a lower layer of corpses, and wait to be killed. If the respondent did, Men get more questions right, even after controlling for religious affiliation, education level, race and ethnicity, age, region, and marital status. Ethan J. Hollander, Springer, Oct 25, 2016. Most of these sites were forced labor camps for foreign workers and not part of the Nazi concentration camp system administered by the SS. [34] German troops destroyed villages throughout the Soviet Union,[360] rounded up civilians for forced labor in Germany, and caused famine by taking foodstuffs. [52], Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. Nearly nine-in-ten Jews know that about 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, compared with two-thirds of agnostics (64%) and atheists (63%) who get this question right. Sunday, April 30th 2023, 9:45 PM EDT. It was 6 million. [5] Gold fillings were pulled from the corpses before burial, but unlike in Auschwitz the women's hair was cut before death. Open about his hatred of Jews, he subscribed to common antisemitic stereotypes. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. [115] On 26 November 1942, 532 Jews were taken by police officers, at four o'clock in the morning, to Oslo harbor, where they boarded a German ship. EuroDocs. [372], On 7 September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich stated that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be murdered. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. [168] Longerich wrote in 2010 that the gradual increase in brutality and numbers killed between July and September 1941 suggests there was "no particular order". The following chart shows the estimated number of Jews killed during the Holocaust by country. [292] Raul Hilberg accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: compliance might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated. Roughly one-in-five respondents do not answer any of the Holocaust knowledge questions correctly, mainly because they say they are not sure about the answers to the questions. By March 1941 all Jews had lost their jobs and had their property confiscated. As more documents come to light or as scholars arrive at a more precise understanding of the Holocaust, estimates of human losses may change. In other words, the presence of a live interviewer may encourage people to answer questions differently than they would if no one was observing their (self-recorded) responses. [159][160] The Germans used the ravine for mass killings throughout the war; up to 100,000 may have been killed there. This time, we also included a few questions aimed at measuring how much Americans know about the Holocaust, resulting in this report. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939. With regard to the Polish and Soviet civilian figures, at this time there are not sufficient demographic tools to enable historians to distinguish between: Virtually all deaths of Soviet, Polish, and Serb civilians during the course of military and anti-partisan operations had, however, a racist component. An additional 542 respondents were sampled from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel all of them Jewish, Mormon or Hispanic Protestant, to bolster the samples for these subgroups. Between 15 May and early July 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered by gas; there were four transports a day, each carrying 3,000 people. Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust. Archived from the original on 26 June 2015. TTY: 202.488.0406, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Jewish Losses during the Holocaust: By Country, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center, around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figure for Jews), around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers), around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites), Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina), People with disabilities living in institutions, Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials, German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory, hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above), Auschwitz complex (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps), Shooting operations at various locations in central and southern German-occupied Poland (the Government General), Shooting operations in German-annexed western Poland (District Wartheland), Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps, Shooting operations and gas wagons at hundreds of locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union, Shooting operations in the Soviet Union (German, Austrian, Czech Jews deported to the Soviet Union), Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia, Shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaa regime.