The Holocaust, 1939 - 1945

• After World War Two started in September 1939, the Nazis initially moved east, invading Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union.

• This brought millions of Jewish people under their control. The Nazis decided to increase their persecution of Jewish people, and eventually resolved to murder them.

• At the Wannsee Conference, senior Nazis set out how they would implement their plan to commit mass murder.

The Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jewish men, women and children by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War Two.

The word ‘Holocaust’ comes from two Ancient Greek words: ‘holos’, which means ‘completely’, and ‘kaustos’, meaning ‘burnt’. The original meaning of this word referred to a religious sacrifice, which the mass murder of Jewish people was not. As a result, many people prefer to use a different term, such as the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’, which means ‘catastrophe’.

The Nazis and their collaborators persecuted and murdered many other groups of people, too. Slavic peoples, Roma and Sinti, Black people and mixed race people were targeted because they did not fit within the Nazis’ racist idea of a master ‘Aryan race’. This idea had first developed during the 1800s, and was based on the false belief that people from northern and western Europe were racially superior to groups of people from outside these regions. There is no scientific basis for these beliefs.

The Nazis’ false belief in genetic superiority also led to the persecution and murder of people with disabilities. Gay men were targeted for slightly different reasons, mainly because the Nazis believed that they were ‘failing’ in their duty to the creation of the so-called ‘Aryan race’ by supposedly not having children.

Other groups of people were persecuted because they were political opponents of the Nazi regime. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, refused to accept Nazi rule because of their spiritual beliefs. They were also opposed to war. Prisoners of warfrom the Soviet Union suffered persecution and murder on the basis of their political opposition to Nazi rule, and because they were from eastern Europe, and therefore not part of the so-called ‘Aryan race’.

All of these groups of people were persecuted in different ways and for different reasons, all of which were rooted in Nazi ideas. There is more information about the persecution of these groups of people in this guide about non-Jewish victims of Nazism.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. This started World War Two. There were 3.5 million Jews living in Poland at the time.

The Nazis decided that they would build ghettos in towns and cities in Poland, forcing Polish Jews to move into them. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, which grew to contain over 400,000 Jews. Walls were built around some ghettos, to separate them from the rest of the city or town. If people escaped from the ghetto and were caught, they would be killed.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews were forced to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David printed on it.

Conditions in ghettos were appalling. On average, there were between eight and ten people living in every room. Food rations were deliberately low. On average, people received 1,200 calories a day in 1940, and this later dropped further. Between 1940 and 1942, it is estimated that up to 100,000 people died of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.

In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This was codenamed ‘Operation Barbarossa’.

As the German army advanced east, 3,000 SS troops, who were split into four units, rounded up groups of Jews and shot them dead. These four units of SS troops were called the Einsatzgruppen. They often acted with the assistance of the Waffen SS, the Order Police, the German army and local collaborators. It is estimated over 2 million Jews had been murdered in this way by 1944.

Historians have referred to the Nazis’ policy of committing mass murder by shooting as the ‘Holocaust by bullets’.

In September 1941, members of the Einsatzgruppen murdered almost 34,000 Jews over a two-day period at Babyn Yar, also known as Babi Yar, near the city of Kyiv, in Ukraine. This was one of many sites of the mass murder of Jewish people across Eastern Europe.

Nazi Germany invaded and occupied many countries across Europe following the outbreak of war. Jews and other groups of people suffered persecution across the continent.

This was often made possible with the collaboration of local police and government organisations. Following their defeat to the German army, France was controlled by the German government. However, at times, French authorities went beyond what they were asked to do by their German occupiers. Marshal Philippe Pétain, a French general who had fought in World War One, became head of state. His government brought in many antisemitic laws and policies. Pétain also opened several concentration camps in France, and his government participated in the murder of Roma people.

In Belgium, in 1940, the Nazi occupiers forced Jewish people to register with the authorities, and introduced laws that discriminated against Jews. By the end of 1940, Jewish people were not allowed take up jobs in several professions. In the Netherlands, the Dutch civil service carried out the Nazis’ demand to make a register of Jewish people, in January 1941.

In January 1942, a meeting was held at Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin. Leading members of the Nazi government and the SS were present. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, who was head of the Reich Security Main Office. Heydrich had helped to organise ‘Kristallnacht’ and set up the Einsatzgruppen.

At the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich set out the plans for the mass transportation of Jews from across Nazi occupied territory to Eastern Europe, where they would be murdered through forced labour, starvation and disease, or in the gas chambers of newly built extermination camps. This was referred to as the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question’, which was the phrase that the Nazis used for the Holocaust. The ‘Final Solution’ was a decision to set out to murder all Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Extermination camps were built, and from 1942 the Nazis began what they called ‘liquidating the ghettos’. This meant that people were taken out of the ghettos and sent to extermination camps.

Following the Wannsee Conference, the SS began the mass transportation of Jews from ghettos and Nazi occupied territory to extermination camps in Eastern Europe. There were six of these camps:

• Auschwitz-Birkenau

• Belzec

• Chełmno

• Majdanek

• Sobibor

• Treblinka

Gas chambers were built at the camps, where people were murdered. The camps also had crematoriums to burn the bodies, reducing them to ashes. These were constructed with the intention of carrying out the ‘Final Solution’, the mass murder of millions of Jewish people.

The largest death camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, built near Kraków, Poland. Approximately 1 million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz.

Like several other concentration and extermination camps, Auschwitz also had a number of sub camps, which were smaller camps attached to the main, larger camp.

Trains delivered people to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The trains were overcrowded and many people died on the journey.

On arrival at Auschwitz, people were split into two groups. One was those who were considered healthy enough to work, and the second was made up mainly of elderly people, women and children, who were sent straight to the gas chambers and killed.

Those selected for work were tattooed with a number when they arrived, had their hair shaved and were forced to wear a striped uniform. People were forced to do hard labour in very difficult conditions. When they became too frail to work, they were sent to the gas chambers.

Barracks were made up of wooden bunks. Each room was designed to hold up to 200 people, but often ended up with up to 2,000. People were forced to line up in roll call square every morning and evening to be counted. If the number of prisoners present did not match records, they were made to stand in the square until the missing people were accounted for.

Images of Auschwitz-Birkenau

6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. However, Jewish people found many different ways to resist Nazi persecution.Resistance was very common. Not all resistance was violent. For example, against Nazi orders, people in the ghettos established schools, to maintain education and morale.

Janina David, a Jewish child who lived in the Warsaw ghetto, remembered that parents would ‘organise small groups of children, four or five at a time… we met once or twice a week in somebody’s room… people learnt foreign languages: Latin, Greek, German, French, English’. People in the Łódź ghetto, Poland, even established a theatre. It opened in 1941 and mainly staged works written by Jewish artists. When the Nazis banned Jewish people from observing their religious customs, people resisted by continuing to practice their faith. Jews continued to observe religious festivals, such as Passover, and organised prayer groups.

Abraham Zwirek, a young Jewish man who lived in the Plock and Suchedniow ghettos, Poland, noted that ‘religious customs among Jewish people became very strong, although conducted in a quiet way’. In the concentration and extermination camps, people resisted by smuggling messages and information about what was happening to the outside world.

There were also a number of instances of Jewish people using violent and armed resistance against the Nazis, in both the ghettos and the concentration and extermination camps:

• Warsaw ghetto: In April 1943, Jewish residents of the ghetto ambushed SS officers who were intending to transport Jews to death camps. This was the first civilian uprising anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. The resisters threw grenades and Molotov cocktails at the SS soldiers, and they had support from resistance fighters outside the ghetto. The SS began burning down buildings in the ghetto and the uprising ended on 16 May 1943, with the blowing up of the Great Synagogue in the ghetto. It is estimated the SS had 110 casualties, and up to 13,000 Jews were killed by the SS. A concentration camp was built on the site of the ghetto ruins.

• Treblinka: In August 1943, inmates at Treblinka seized weapons and set fire to buildings in the camp. Over 300 managed to escape and though many were captured and killed, it is estimated that 70 were not caught, and survived to the end of the war.

The first extermination camp to be liberated was Majdanek, in Poland. Soviet troops arrived there in July 1944.

Auschwitz was liberated six months later, in January 1945. When the Nazis realised that Soviet troops were close, the SS tried to move surviving inmates from Auschwitz to the west, on foot. These were called death marches, as many of the inmates were too frail or ill to walk this huge distance.

Jan Hartman, a young Czech Jewish man who was forced onto a death march, remembered it as ‘something unforgettable: the Polish countryside was under snow, freezing cold, January, the temperature must have gone down to 30 below zero or more, very cold’. When they arrived at Auschwitz, Soviet soldiers found 6,000 prisoners still alive.

The Holocaust Educational Trust gave advice and guidance during the production of this guide.