The Holocaust

Strasbourg, part of the Holy Roman Empire, was the scene of the first mass holocaust of Jews in Europe in 1349. Collectively accused of causing the Black Death by poisoning the local water supplies, 2,000 men, women and children were herded into a circle and burnt alive.

Adolf Hitler wrote in his political testament Mein Kampf, "All those who are not racially pure are mere chaff". Once his Nazi party came into power in Germany they built a series of concentration camps where they put into operation their plan to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

Construction of the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau was completed on March 22, 1933.

Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring ordered SS General Reinhard Heydrich to submit concrete proposals for "the final solution of the Jewish question" on July 31, 1941.

Hundreds of thousands of Moroccan Jews were saved from being deported to concentration camps thanks to Sultan Mohamed V who told the Nazis in 1941 "there are no Moroccan Jews or Muslims, only Moroccans."

The picture below is a February 26, 1942 letter to Martin Luther in which Reinhard Heydrich follows up on the Wannsee Conference by asking Luther for administrative assistance in the implementation of the "Endlösung der Judenfrage" (Final Solution of the Jewish Question).

German Nazis aided by their collaborators began the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev, Ukraine on September 29, 1941. They killed over 30,000 Jewish civilians in two days and thousands more in the months that followed.

Felix Lembersky, Execution: Babi Yar, ca. 1944–1952

The Aktion Reinhard camps were a group of three extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. The camps were established with the express purpose of implementing the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," which was the Nazi's plan for the extermination of European Jews.

The three camps that comprised the Aktion Reinhard system were Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The camps were named after Odilo Globocnik, who was in charge of the operation. The Aktion Reinhard camps were different from the concentration camps, as they were designed solely for the purpose of mass murder, and no prisoners were held there for any extended period.

March 17, 1942 marked the commencement of the first mass killings of Jews at the Bełżec extermination camp. This was the inaugural instance of the Aktion Reinhard camps being put into operation.

During this time, an estimated 1.7 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered in the gas chambers at these camps. The victims were transported there in railway cars, and upon arrival, were immediately sent to the gas chambers and murdered using carbon monoxide.

The systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begun on July 22, 1942.

Hitler carefully collected Jewish artifacts and took photos of Jews to be preserved in what he called, "The Museum of an Extinct Race.”

One of the highest death rates in the Holocaust was in Bulgarian-occupied Greece, where 97 percent of Jews were killed in March 1943.

Despite Denmark being occupied by Nazi Germany, over 99% of Denmark's Jewish community was spared from the Holocaust by being evacuated to Sweden in 1943.

A tip from a Dutch informer led the Gestapo to a sealed-off area in an Amsterdam warehouse where they found and arrested teenage Jewish diarist Anne Frank, her family, and four others in August 1944.

When Soviet forces liberated the Łódź Ghetto on January 19, 1945, only 877 Jews of the initial population of 164,000 remained at that time.

Resettlement of Jews to the Ghetto area c. March 1940.

Six million Jews died in Hitler's gas ovens.

99% of Jewish children in Poland died in the Holocaust. Only 5,000 were left out of a pre-war population of 1 million.

The photograph below shows fewer than half of the bodies of the several hundred inmates who died of starvation or were shot by the Gestapo in the yard of the Boelcke Barracks, a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp located in the south-east of the town of Nordhausen. By T4c. James E Myers - This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier)

 By T4c. James E Myers - the National Archives and Records Administration,

On February 5 1997, the so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announced the creation of a $71 million fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.

January 27 was designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on November 1, 2005. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews and 11 million others, by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The date marks January 27, 1945, when the the Nazi Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland was liberated by the Red Army.

Alice Herz-Sommer was the oldest Holocaust survivor until her death, aged 110, in February 2014.

The company that created Zyklon B, the gas that was used to kill millions of Jews in the Holocaust, still exists, it is currently a pest control company.

In 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower predicted that people would try to dispel the holocaust as a falsehood, and ordered innumerable pictures to be taken of the Nazi crimes to hinder any such attempts.

Starving prisoners in Mauthausen camp liberated on 5 May 1945.

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust was formed in 1961 by a group of Holocaust survivors who met during ESL classes at Hollywood High School. It is the first of its kind in the US,

Denying the Holocaust is a punishable crime in 16 countries. In Germany it is punishable by up to five years in prison.

A holocaust denial group offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove that gas chambers were used to intentionally kill people at Auschwitz. They were forced by a judge to pay that money, plus an additional $40,000, to Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein who provided proof of that very fact.

Here is a list of songs about The Holocaust.