Conservapedia - User contributions [en]

European Union

2007-05-11T05:04:25Z

Drakengor: /* Candidates for membership */

[[Image:567rugyhj.png|right|thumb|300px|Flag of the European Union.]]
The '''European Union (EU)''' is a legal and economic union of 27 European nations. It was formed in 1993 with the ratification of the [[Maastricht Treaty]], though its predecessor, the European Economic Community, was founded in 1957.

As an institution, the EU has more powers over its member states and their citizens than is the case with most international bodies; 13 of its member states also use a common [[currency]], the [[Euro]]. It is not, however, generally regarded as a federation or state in its own right. Rather, it stands somewhere between these two points.

==Structure==

The EU, technically speaking, consists of three separate "pillars" - the '''European Communities''', the '''Common Foreign and Security Policy''', and '''Police and Judicial Co-Operation in Criminal Matters'''. The most important of these "pillars" is the European Communities, and the term "European Union" is often used as a synonym for the European Communities.

The EU is governed primarily by three institutions: the '''Council''', the '''European Commission''' and the '''European Parliament'''.

The Council consists of representatives of each member state. These representatives change depending on what the purpose of the Council's meeting is and what is being discussed (for example, the ministers of finance of each country may attend a meeting on fiscal policy).

The Commission functions roughly as the EU's executive branch. It consists of 27 Commissioners, one nominated by each member state, though on taking office the Commissioners are required to put aside their allegiance to their own countries and to act in the interests of the EU as a whole. The President of the Commission acts to some extent as a figurehead for the EU, and is the nearest thing there is to a "President of Europe". The current Commission President is [[José Manuel Barroso]], a conservative and a former Prime Minister of Portugal. Perhaps the best known Commission President was [[Jacques Delors]] (1985-1995), a French socialist who passionately favoured European integration. A personal enemy of Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]], he was famously attacked by the conservative British tabloid newspaper ''The Sun'' with the slogan "Up yours, Delors".

The European Parliament consists of 785 members directly elected by the citizens of the member states. National parties sit in broad Europe-wide groupings: for example, most members of left-wing parties sit together as the "Party of European Socialists". No party grouping currently has an overall majority, but the main conservative grouping (the European People's Party) currently has the largest number of seats (277).

The EU has its own judicial apparatus, consisting most notably of the '''Court of First Instance''' and the '''European Court of Justice''', the latter being the supreme judicial authority of the Union. It should not be confused with the [[European Court of Human Rights]], which is entirely separate from the EU and its institutions.

==Sovereignty==

The member states of the European Union fall under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Similar to Federal Law trumping State Law in United States politics, the EU member states are obligated to follow the laws set forth by the European Court of Justice. This system of government takes sovereignty from the nation, and rests it in the EU court of Justice. Some political theorists argue that the EU is thus the death of the Nation. By the rules of The Treaty of Westphalia, nations are defined by their rite of Self-Sovereignty.

==Criticism==

A significant number of Europeans on the political right of centre are opposed to the EU on the grounds that it undermines national sovereignty and identity. Such people are known in British English as "Eurosceptics", and they include such people as the former British Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]] (although, while in power, she committed Britain to the 1986 [[Single European Act]], a major integrationist measure) and the members of the [[UK Independence Party]]. They also, however, include less well-respected right-wing politicians belonging to far right or [[nationalism|nationalist]] parties, such as France's [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]]. There are also extreme left-wing opponents of the European Union, such as ''Die Linke'' in Germany, who regard it as constituting an anti-progressive "Fortress Europe", and claim that EU membership impedes countries from following socialist policies.

==Candidates for membership==

There are three official candidates being considered for membership, [[Turkey]], [[Croatia]] and [[The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia]]. Typically a country that is considered will have to make some economic or social changes to bring it in line with other member states.

There is some conflict between current EU member states over possible candidates for membership. For example, The United Kingdom is in favor of adding Turkey to the EU, while France is strongly against Turkey's possible membership.

Here is a map of the European Union as of January 2007, including countries seeking to join: [[Image:European_Union.jpg|right|thumb|350px|Member states of the European Union.]]

Gateway to the European Union (EU official website) [http://europa.eu/]

[[Category:Europe]]
[[category:politics]]

European Union

2007-05-11T05:04:02Z

Drakengor:

[[Image:567rugyhj.png|right|thumb|300px|Flag of the European Union.]]
The '''European Union (EU)''' is a legal and economic union of 27 European nations. It was formed in 1993 with the ratification of the [[Maastricht Treaty]], though its predecessor, the European Economic Community, was founded in 1957.

As an institution, the EU has more powers over its member states and their citizens than is the case with most international bodies; 13 of its member states also use a common [[currency]], the [[Euro]]. It is not, however, generally regarded as a federation or state in its own right. Rather, it stands somewhere between these two points.

==Structure==

The EU, technically speaking, consists of three separate "pillars" - the '''European Communities''', the '''Common Foreign and Security Policy''', and '''Police and Judicial Co-Operation in Criminal Matters'''. The most important of these "pillars" is the European Communities, and the term "European Union" is often used as a synonym for the European Communities.

The EU is governed primarily by three institutions: the '''Council''', the '''European Commission''' and the '''European Parliament'''.

The Council consists of representatives of each member state. These representatives change depending on what the purpose of the Council's meeting is and what is being discussed (for example, the ministers of finance of each country may attend a meeting on fiscal policy).

The Commission functions roughly as the EU's executive branch. It consists of 27 Commissioners, one nominated by each member state, though on taking office the Commissioners are required to put aside their allegiance to their own countries and to act in the interests of the EU as a whole. The President of the Commission acts to some extent as a figurehead for the EU, and is the nearest thing there is to a "President of Europe". The current Commission President is [[José Manuel Barroso]], a conservative and a former Prime Minister of Portugal. Perhaps the best known Commission President was [[Jacques Delors]] (1985-1995), a French socialist who passionately favoured European integration. A personal enemy of Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]], he was famously attacked by the conservative British tabloid newspaper ''The Sun'' with the slogan "Up yours, Delors".

The European Parliament consists of 785 members directly elected by the citizens of the member states. National parties sit in broad Europe-wide groupings: for example, most members of left-wing parties sit together as the "Party of European Socialists". No party grouping currently has an overall majority, but the main conservative grouping (the European People's Party) currently has the largest number of seats (277).

The EU has its own judicial apparatus, consisting most notably of the '''Court of First Instance''' and the '''European Court of Justice''', the latter being the supreme judicial authority of the Union. It should not be confused with the [[European Court of Human Rights]], which is entirely separate from the EU and its institutions.

==Sovereignty==

The member states of the European Union fall under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Similar to Federal Law trumping State Law in United States politics, the EU member states are obligated to follow the laws set forth by the European Court of Justice. This system of government takes sovereignty from the nation, and rests it in the EU court of Justice. Some political theorists argue that the EU is thus the death of the Nation. By the rules of The Treaty of Westphalia, nations are defined by their rite of Self-Sovereignty.

==Criticism==

A significant number of Europeans on the political right of centre are opposed to the EU on the grounds that it undermines national sovereignty and identity. Such people are known in British English as "Eurosceptics", and they include such people as the former British Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]] (although, while in power, she committed Britain to the 1986 [[Single European Act]], a major integrationist measure) and the members of the [[UK Independence Party]]. They also, however, include less well-respected right-wing politicians belonging to far right or [[nationalism|nationalist]] parties, such as France's [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]]. There are also extreme left-wing opponents of the European Union, such as ''Die Linke'' in Germany, who regard it as constituting an anti-progressive "Fortress Europe", and claim that EU membership impedes countries from following socialist policies.

==Candidates for membership==

There are three official candidates being considered for membership, [[Turkey]], [[Croatia]] and [[The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia]]. Typically a country that is considered will have to make some economic or social changes to bring it in line with other member states. There is some conflict between current EU member states over possible candidates for membership. For example, The United Kingdom is in favor of adding Turkey to the EU, while France is strongly against Turkey's possible membership.

Here is a map of the European Union as of January 2007, including countries seeking to join: [[Image:European_Union.jpg|right|thumb|350px|Member states of the European Union.]]

Gateway to the European Union (EU official website) [http://europa.eu/]

[[Category:Europe]]
[[category:politics]]

European Union

2007-05-11T05:03:43Z

Drakengor:

[[Image:567rugyhj.png|right|thumb|300px|Flag of the European Union.]]
The '''European Union (EU)''' is a legal and economic union of 27 European nations. It was formed in 1993 with the ratification of the [[Maastricht Treaty]], though its predecessor, the European Economic Community, was founded in 1957.

As an institution, the EU has more powers over its member states and their citizens than is the case with most international bodies; 13 of its member states also use a common [[currency]], the [[Euro]]. It is not, however, generally regarded as a federation or state in its own right. Rather, it stands somewhere between these two points.

The policies of the EU tend to be [[liberal]] or even [[socialism|socialist]] by American standards, in keeping with the generally liberal political culture of European countries.

==Structure==

The EU, technically speaking, consists of three separate "pillars" - the '''European Communities''', the '''Common Foreign and Security Policy''', and '''Police and Judicial Co-Operation in Criminal Matters'''. The most important of these "pillars" is the European Communities, and the term "European Union" is often used as a synonym for the European Communities.

The EU is governed primarily by three institutions: the '''Council''', the '''European Commission''' and the '''European Parliament'''.

The Council consists of representatives of each member state. These representatives change depending on what the purpose of the Council's meeting is and what is being discussed (for example, the ministers of finance of each country may attend a meeting on fiscal policy).

The Commission functions roughly as the EU's executive branch. It consists of 27 Commissioners, one nominated by each member state, though on taking office the Commissioners are required to put aside their allegiance to their own countries and to act in the interests of the EU as a whole. The President of the Commission acts to some extent as a figurehead for the EU, and is the nearest thing there is to a "President of Europe". The current Commission President is [[José Manuel Barroso]], a conservative and a former Prime Minister of Portugal. Perhaps the best known Commission President was [[Jacques Delors]] (1985-1995), a French socialist who passionately favoured European integration. A personal enemy of Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]], he was famously attacked by the conservative British tabloid newspaper ''The Sun'' with the slogan "Up yours, Delors".

The European Parliament consists of 785 members directly elected by the citizens of the member states. National parties sit in broad Europe-wide groupings: for example, most members of left-wing parties sit together as the "Party of European Socialists". No party grouping currently has an overall majority, but the main conservative grouping (the European People's Party) currently has the largest number of seats (277).

The EU has its own judicial apparatus, consisting most notably of the '''Court of First Instance''' and the '''European Court of Justice''', the latter being the supreme judicial authority of the Union. It should not be confused with the [[European Court of Human Rights]], which is entirely separate from the EU and its institutions.

==Sovereignty==

The member states of the European Union fall under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Similar to Federal Law trumping State Law in United States politics, the EU member states are obligated to follow the laws set forth by the European Court of Justice. This system of government takes sovereignty from the nation, and rests it in the EU court of Justice. Some political theorists argue that the EU is thus the death of the Nation. By the rules of The Treaty of Westphalia, nations are defined by their rite of Self-Sovereignty.

==Criticism==

A significant number of Europeans on the political right of centre are opposed to the EU on the grounds that it undermines national sovereignty and identity. Such people are known in British English as "Eurosceptics", and they include such people as the former British Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]] (although, while in power, she committed Britain to the 1986 [[Single European Act]], a major integrationist measure) and the members of the [[UK Independence Party]]. They also, however, include less well-respected right-wing politicians belonging to far right or [[nationalism|nationalist]] parties, such as France's [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]]. There are also extreme left-wing opponents of the European Union, such as ''Die Linke'' in Germany, who regard it as constituting an anti-progressive "Fortress Europe", and claim that EU membership impedes countries from following socialist policies.

==Candidates for membership==

There are three official candidates being considered for membership, [[Turkey]], [[Croatia]] and [[The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia]]. Typically a country that is considered will have to make some economic or social changes to bring it in line with other member states. There is some conflict between current EU member states over possible candidates for membership. For example, The United Kingdom is in favor of adding Turkey to the EU, while France is strongly against Turkey's possible membership.

Here is a map of the European Union as of January 2007, including countries seeking to join: [[Image:European_Union.jpg|right|thumb|350px|Member states of the European Union.]]

Gateway to the European Union (EU official website) [http://europa.eu/]

[[Category:Europe]]
[[category:politics]]

Holocaust

2007-05-11T04:44:26Z

Drakengor:

{{sprotected2}}
:''See [[Holocaust (disambiguation)]] and [[Shoah (disambiguation)]].''
[[Image:Selection Birkenau ramp.jpg|right|thumb|300px|"Selection" on the ''Judenrampe'', [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]], May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the [[gas chamber]]s. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from [[Carpathian Ruthenia|Carpatho-Ruthenia]], many of them from the [[Berehove|Berehov]] ghetto. It was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. Courtesy of [[Yad Vashem]]. [http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/home_auschwitz_album.html] ]]
'''The Holocaust''' (from the Greek ''holókauston'' from ''olon'' "completely" and ''kauston'' "burnt"), also known as '''''Ha-Shoah''''' ([[Hebrew language|Hebrew]]: '''השואה'''), '''''Khurbn''''' ([[Yiddish language|Yiddish]]: '''חורבן''' or '''''Halokaust''''', '''האלאקאוסט'''), is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European [[Jew]]s during [[World War II]], as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the [[Nazi Party|National Socialist]] regime in Germany led by [[Adolf Hitler]].<ref name=Niewyk1>Niewyk, Donald L. ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust,'' [[Columbia University Press]], 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II." Also see "The Holocaust," ''Encyclopaedia Britannica'', 2007: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question."</ref>

Other groups were persecuted and killed by the regime, including the [[Roma people|Roma]], Soviet [[Prisoner of war|POWs]], disabled people, gay men, [[Jehovah's Witness]]es, non-Jewish Poles, and political prisoners.<ref name=Berenbaum125ff>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know'', The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, pp.125ff.</ref><ref name=EBnon-Jews>"Non-Jewish victims of Nazism," ''Encyclopaedia Britannica''.</ref> Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews,<ref name=def>
*[http://isurvived.org/Frameset4References-3/-Holocaust-YadVashem.html "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion"], [[Yad Vashem]]: "The Holocaust, as presented in this resource center, is defined as the sum total of all anti-Jewish actions carried out by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945: from stripping the German Jews of their legal and economic status in the 1930s, to segregating and starving Jews in the various occupied countries, to the murder of close to six million Jews in Europe. The Holocaust is part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and murder of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazis."
*Niewyk, Donald L. ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust,'' [[Columbia University Press]], 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II."
*"Holocaust," ''Encyclopaedia Britannica'', 2007: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. '''The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question"''' (emphasis added).
*[http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761559508/Holocaust.html "Holocaust"], ''Encarta'': "Holocaust, the almost complete destruction of Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II (1939-1945). The leadership of Germany’s Nazi Party ordered the extermination of 5.6 million to 5.9 million Jews (see National Socialism). Jews often refer to the Holocaust as Shoah (from the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” or “total destruction”)."
*Paulson, Steve. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/holocaust_overview_01.shtml "A View of the Holocaust"], BBC: "The Holocaust was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It culminated in what the Nazis called the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe', in which six million Jews were murdered."
*[http://www.auschwitz.dk/ "The Holocaust"], ''Auschwitz.dk'': "The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War 2."
*[http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Educational_Resources/Curriculum/Witness___Legacy_-_Educators__/Holocaust_-_Definition/holocaust_-_definition.html "Holocaust—Definition"], ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'', Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies: "HOLOCAUST (Heb., sho'ah). In the 1950s the term came to be applied primarily to the destruction of the Jews of Europe under the Nazi regime, and it is also employed in describing the annihilation of other groups of people in World War II. The mass extermination of Jews has become the archetype of GENOCIDE, and the terms sho'ah and "holocaust" have become linked to the attempt by the Nazi German state to destroy European Jewry during World War II ... One of the first to use the term in the historical perspective was the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg), who, in the spring of 1942, stated that the Holocaust was a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people among the nations of the world."
*Also see the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies list of definitions: "Holocaust: A term for the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945."
*[http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/holocaust?view=uk "The Holocaust"], Compact Oxford English Dictionary: "(the Holocaust) the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime in World War II."
*The 33rd Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches defines the Holocaust as "the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry," cited in Hancock, Ian. [http://www.radoc.net:8088/RADOC-3-PORR.htm "Romanies and the Holocaust: A Reevaluation and an Overview"], Stone, Dan. (ed.) ''The Historiography of the Holocaust''. Palgrave-Macmillan, New York 2004, pp. 383-396.
*[[Yehuda Bauer|Bauer, Yehuda]]. ''Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2001.
*[[Lucy Dawidowicz|Dawidowicz, Lucy]]. ''The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945''. Bantam, 1986, p.xxxvii: "'The Holocaust' is the term that Jews themselves have chosen to describe their fate during World War II."</ref> or what the Nazis called the "[[Final Solution|Final Solution of the Jewish Question]]." Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably: estimates generally place the total number of victims at nine to 11 million.<ref>Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition would produce a death toll of 17 million. A figure of 26 million is given in ''Service d'Information des Crimes de Guerre: Crimes contre la Personne Humain, Camps de Concentration''. Paris, 1946, p. 197.</ref>

The persecution and genocide was accomplished in stages. [[Nuremberg Laws|Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society]] was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. [[Concentration camp]]s were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the [[Nazi Germany|Third Reich]] conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called [[Einsatzgruppen]] murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Roma were crammed into [[Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939 - 1944|ghettos]] before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to [[extermination camp]]s where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."<ref name=Berenbaum103>Berenbaum, Michael. ''The World Must Know," United States Holcaust Museum'', 2006, p. 103.</ref>
{{The Holocaust}}

==Etymology and use of the term==
{{main|Names of the Holocaust}}
The term ''holocaust'' originally derived from the [[Greek Language|Greek]] word ''[[Holocaust (sacrifice)|holókauston]]'', meaning a "completely (''holos'') burnt (''kaustos'')" sacrificial offering to a god. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.

The biblical word '''''Shoa''''' (שואה) (also spelled '''''Shoah''''' and '''''Sho'ah'''''), meaning "calamity," became the standard [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]] term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s.<ref>"[http://www1.yadvashem.org/Odot/prog/index_before_change_table.asp?gate=0-2 "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion"], [[Yad Vashem]], accessed June 8, 2005.</ref> ''Shoa'' is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the [[Theology|theologically]] offensive nature of the original meaning of the word ''holocaust''.

===Definition===
Although the word "holocaust" has been widely used since the 17th century to refer to the violent death of a large number of people, since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted; it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, and is usually spelled with a capital H. According to the [[Oxford English Dictionary]], the word was first used to describe Hitler's treatment of the Jews as early as the spring of 1942, when the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) stated that the Holocaust was a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people.<ref name=EH>[http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Educational_Resources/Curriculum/Witness___Legacy_-_Educators__/Holocaust_-_Definition/holocaust_-_definition.html "Holocaust—Definition"], ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust''.</ref> By the late 1970s, the term had come to refer to the genocide of the European Jews.

The usual [[German language|German]] term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was ''Endlösung der Judenfrage'' (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to the Holocaust.<ref>A useful analysis of the terms can be found in Bartov, Omer. "Antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Reinterpretation of National Socialism," in Berenbaum, Michael & Peck, Abraham J. (eds.) ''The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined''. Bloomington 1998, pp. 75-98.</ref>

The word "holocaust" is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include the killing of around half a million Roma and Sinti, the deaths of several million Soviet prisoners of war, the killing of the intelligentsia, slave laborers, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents. The use of the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European [[antisemitism]], that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.

Even more hotly disputed is the extension of the word to describe events that have no connection with World War II. It is used by [[Armenia|Armenians]] to describe the [[Armenian genocide]] of [[World War I]]. The terms "[[Rwanda|Rwandan]] Holocaust" and "[[Cambodia|Cambodian]] Holocaust" are also used to refer to the [[Genocide in Rwanda|Rwanda genocide]] of 1994 and the mass killings of the [[Khmer Rouge]] regime in Cambodia respectively.

==Distinctive features==
===Efficiency and scale===
<table style="float" align="right">
<tr><td>[[Image:Massdeportations.PNG|thumb|250px|[[Ghettos]] were established in Europe in which Jews were confined before being shipped to extermination camps.]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:Hoefletelegram.jpg|right|thumb|250px|The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the [[Höfle Telegram]] sent to [[Adolf Eichmann]] in January, 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four [[Aktion Reinhard]] camps during 1942.]]</td></tr>
<tr><td>
</td></tr>
</table>
The Holocaust can be distinguished from other [[genocides in history|genocides]] by the industrial nature of the killings.

[[Michael Berenbaum]] writes that Germany became a "genocidal nation."<ref name=Berenbaum103/> Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the ovens; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the [[Dehomag]] company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators ... Germany's greatest achievement."<ref name=Berenbaum104>Berenbaum, Michael. ''The World Must Know," United States Holcaust Museum'', 2006, p. 104.</ref>

In 1941, after occupying [[Belarus]], the Nazis used mental patients from [[Minsk]] psychiatric hospitals to test the efficiency of their mass killing. Initially, they tried shooting them by having them stand one behind the other, so that several people could be killed with one bullet, but it was too slow. Then they tried [[dynamite]], but few were killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing. In October 1941, in [[Mogilev]], gas was poured into a ''Gaswagen'' or "gas car," developed by [[Walter Rauff]]; it took more than 30 minutes for the people inside to die. Later, a large truck exhaust was tried out, which killed everyone inside the ''Gaswagen'' in eight minutes.<ref name=Overy>Overy, Richard. ''Russia's War.'' Penguin Books, 1998.</ref> In the spring of 1942, the [[extermination camp]]s began operating. [[Carbon monoxide]] was used in the gas chambers at [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]], [[Sobibór extermination camp|Sobibór]], and [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]], while [[Zyklon B]], a [[cyanide]]-based insecticide, was employed at [[Majdanek]] and [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]].<ref>[http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-215490/Holocaust "The extermination camps"], Encyclop&ae;dia Britannica.</ref>

The disposal of large numbers of bodies presented a logistical problem. The Nazis studied how to improve fuel efficiency, using a combination of different fuels, such as [[Coke (fuel)|coke]], wood, and body fat. According to surviving [[Sonderkommandos]], multiple bodies were added to the furnaces to obtain optimal fuel efficiency and speed, particularly when the demand was higher.<ref name=Zimmerman>Zimmerman, John C. [http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/body-disposal "Body disposal at Auschwitz: The end of Holocaust denial"], The Holocaust History Project.</ref>

The mass killing was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries.<ref>{{cite web|title=Holocaust Map of Concentration and Death Camps|url=http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blmap.htm}}</ref> The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939; about five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The [[Wannsee Conference|Wannsee Protocol]] makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland.<ref name=GilbertOxford>[[Martin Gilbert|Gilbert, Martin]]. ''The Oxford Companion to World War II'' Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.</ref> The extermination continued in Nazi-controlled territory until the end of [[World War II]], ending only when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945.

===Medical experiments===
<table style="float" align="right">
<tr><td>
[[Image:Dachau cold water immersion.jpg|right|thumb|250px|A cold water immersion experiment at [[Dachau concentration camp]] presided over by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr. Rascher (right). The victim is wearing a [[Luftwaffe]] garment.]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:RomanichildrenAuschwitz.jpg|thumb|250px|Romani children in [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]], victims of medical experiments.]]
</td></tr>
</table>
{{see|Doctors' Trial|Josef Mengele|Nazi human experimentation|Miklós Nyiszli}}
Another distinctive feature was the use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at [[Auschwitz]], [[Dachau]], [[Buchenwald]], [[Ravensbrück]], [[Sachsenhausen]] and [[Natzweiler]] concentration camps.<ref>See Harran, Marilyn. ''The Holocaust Chronicles, A History in Words and Pictures'', Louis Weber, 2000.</ref>

The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. [[Josef Mengele]], who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and various amputations and other brutal surgeries.<ref name=Harran384>Harran, Marilyn. ''The Holocaust Chronicles, A History in Words and Pictures'', Louis Weber, 2000, p. 384.</ref> The full extent of his work will never be known because the two truckloads of records he sent to Dr. [[Otmar von Verschuer]] at the [[Kaiser Wilhelm Institute]] were destroyed by von Verschuer. {{Fact|date=May 2007}} Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected after the experiments.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele."<ref name=Berenbaum194>Berenbaum, Michael. ''The World Must Know'', United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, p. 194-195.</ref>

Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

{{Quotation|I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents — I remember the mother's name was Stella — managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.<ref name=Berenbaum194/>}}

==Victims and death toll==
===Jewish victims===
<table style="float" align="right">
<tr><td>[[Image:WieselAuschwitzpits.jpg|thumb|right|240px|Members of the ''[[Sonderkommando]]'' burn corpses in the firepits at [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz II-Birkenau]]. Photographer Alberto Errera, August 1944. Courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, Poland. <ref>[http://www.auschwitz.org.pl Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Oświęcim, Poland].</ref>]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:Coffinmap.jpg|thumb|240px|right|Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by [[Einsatzgruppe]] A" from the December 1941 [[Einsatzgruppen#The Jäger Report|Jäger Report]] by the commander of a [[Einsatzgruppen|Nazi death squad]]. Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the [[Baltic countries|Baltic region]], and reads at the bottom: ''"the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000"''. [[Estonia]] is marked as ''[[judenfrei]]'' ("free of Jews").]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>[[Image:The War Against the JewsTable.png|thumb|right|240px|Figures from [[Lucy Dawidowicz]] showing the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe.<ref>[[Lucy Dawidowicz|Dawidowicz, Lucy]]. ''The War Against the Jews'', Bantam, 1986.</ref>]]
</td></tr>
</table>
{{Quotation|
:*Further information: ''[[The Destruction of the European Jews]]'', ''[[The War Against the Jews]]''}}
Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been six million. The Holocaust commemoration center, the [[Yad Vashem]] Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in [[Jerusalem]], comments:

{{Quotation|There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The figure commonly used is the six million quoted by [[Adolf Eichmann]], a senior SS official. Most research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor [[Raul Hilberg]]) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr. Robert Rozett in the [[Encyclopedia of the Holocaust]], estimates the Jewish losses at 5.59–5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr. Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29 million to six million.<p>

The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used. We estimate that Yad Vashem currently has somewhat more than four million names of victims that are accessible.<ref>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/faqs/answers/faq_3.html "How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust?"], FAQs about the Holocaust, [[Yad Vashem]].</ref>}}

[[Raul Hilberg]], in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, ''[[The Destruction of the European Jews]]'', estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the Holocaust. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings"; and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000".<ref>Hilberg, Raul. The destruction of the European Jews (Yale Univ. Press, 2003, c1961).</ref> Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.<ref>Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum, Raul Hilberg, Franciszek Piper, Yehuda Bauer, ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', Indiana University Press, 1998, p.71.</ref> British historian [[Martin Gilbert]] used a similar approach in his ''Atlas of the Holocaust,'' but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.<ref>Gilbert, Martin, Atlas of the Holocaust, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1993.</ref>

[[Lucy Dawidowicz|Lucy S. Dawidowicz]] used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see her figures [[:Image:The War Against the JewsTable.png|here]].<ref>[[Lucy Dawidowicz|Dawidowicz, Lucy]]. ''The War Against The Jews, 1933–1945''. New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.</ref>

One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in ''Dimension des Volksmords'' (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in the ''[[Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust]]'' (1990).<ref>Wolfgang Benz in Dimension des Volksmords: Die Zahl der Jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Deutscher Taschebuch Verlag, 1991). Israel Gutman, ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,'' Macmillan Reference Books; Reference edition (October 1, 1995)</ref>

There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The 6 million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy and Norway. Finally, of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths.

The number of people killed at the major [[extermination camp]]s has been estimated as follows:

{{Quotation|
[[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]]: 1.4 million;<ref name=yvsau>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/education/lessonplan/english/auschwitz/auschwitz.htm "Learning and Remembering about Auschwitz-Birkenau"], Yad Vashem.</ref> [[Belzec]]: 600,000;<ref name=yvsbe>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%205981.pdf Belzec], Yad Vashem.</ref> [[Chelmno]]: 320,000;<ref name=yvsch>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%202494.pdf Chelmno], Yad Vashem.</ref> [[Jasenovac concentration camp|Jasenovac]]: 600,000;<ref name=yvsja>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206358.pdf Jasenovac], Yad Vashem.</ref> [[Majdanek]]: 360,000;<ref name=yvsmaj>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206622.pdf Majdanek], Yad Vashem.</ref> [[Maly Trostinets]]: 65,000;<ref name=yvsmal>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206636.pdf Maly Trostinets], Yad Vashem.</ref> [[Sobibór]]: 250,000;<ref name=yvsso>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206030.pdf Sobibór], Yad Vashem.</ref> and [[Treblinka]]: 870,000.<ref name=yvstr>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%205886.pdf Treblinka], Yad Vashem.</ref>}}

This gives a total of over 3.8 million, excluding Jasenovac (where most victims were ethnic Serbs). Of these, 80%-90% were estimated to be Jews. These seven camps alone thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.

In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent. Another 800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed by the ''Einsatzgruppen'' in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the ''Einsatzgruppen'' killings were frequently undocumented). Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.

===Non-Jewish victims===
{|class="wikitable" align="right" style="margin-left:1em;font-size:80%"
! Victims !! Killed !! Source
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Soviet POWs
| align="right"|2–3 million || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=Berenbaum125>Berenbaum, Michael. ''The World Must Know'', United States Holcoaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 125.</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Politicals
| align="right"|1–1.5 million|| style="text-align: center"|
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Serbs
| align="right"|600,000|| style="text-align: center"|<ref>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206358.pdf Yad Vashem Center]</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Poles
| align="right"|200,000+<ref>This figure represents victims who died in camps.</ref>|| style="text-align: center"|<ref>1.8–1.9 million non-Jewish Polish citizens are estimated to have died as a result of the Nazi occupation and the war. Estimates are from Polish scholar, Franciszek Piper, the chief historian at Auschwitz. [http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/poles/poles.php?menu=/export/home/www/doc_root/education/foreducators/include/menu.txt&bgcolor=CD9544 Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era] at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Roma
| align="right"|220,000–500,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref>[http://www.holocaust-trc.org/sinti.htm "Sinti and Roma"], United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The USHMM places the scholarly estimates at 220,000–500,000. Michael Berenbaum in ''The World Must Know'', also published by the USHMM, writes that "serious scholars estimate that between 90,000 and 220,000 were killed under German rule." (Berenbaum, Michael. ''The World Must Know," United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 126.</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Freemasons
| align="right"|80,000–200,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name="Dummies">Hodapp, Christopher. ''Freemasons for Dummies'', For Dummies, 2005.</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Disabled
| align="right"|75,000-250,000|| style="text-align: center"|
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Spanish POWs
| align="right"|7,000-16,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=SpanishPOWs>Wingeate Pike, David. ''Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube'', 2000; Razola, Marcel & Constante, Mariano. ''Triangle bleu''; Gilbert, Martin. ''The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War'', Owl Books, 1987; [http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Mauthausen/KZMauthausen/History/SpanishRepublicans.html "Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen"], ''Scrapbookpages.com''.</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|Gay men
| align="right"|5,000-15,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=Chronicle108>''The Holocaust Chronicle'', Publications International Ltd., p. 108.</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|JWitnesses
| align="right"|2,500-5,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=Shulman>Shulman, William L. ''A State of Terror: Germany 1933-1939''. Bayside, New York: Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.</ref>
|}
{{Quotation|
:*Further information: [[Generalplan Ost]], [[Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles]], [[Second World War persecution and genocide of Serbs]], [[Nacht und Nebel]].}}

====Soviet POWs====
According to Michael Berenbaum, between two and three million Soviet prisoners-of-war — 57 percent of all Soviet POWs — died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions between June 1941 and May 1945, most of them during their first year of captivity. The death rates decreased as the POWs were needed to work as slaves to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million of them had been deployed as slave labor.<ref name=Berenbaum125/>

====Roma====
{{main|Porajmos}}
Because the Roma and Sinti are traditionally a secretive people with a culture based on [[oral history]], less is known about their fate than about that of any other group.<ref name=Niewyk47>Niewyk, Donald & Nicosia, Frances. "The Gypsies," ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust'', p. 47.</ref><ref name=Brockes>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1361751,00.html "We had the same pain"], ''The Guardian'', November 29, 2004.</ref> [[Yehuda Bauer]] writes that the lack of information can be attributed to the Roma's distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the basic taboos of Romani culture regarding hygiene and sexual contact were violated at Auschwitz. Bauer writes that "[m]ost [Roma] could not relate their stories involving these tortures; as a result, most kept silent and thus increased the effects of the massive trauma they had undergone."<ref name=BauerRoma453>[[Yehuda Bauer|Bauer, Yehuda]]. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp''. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 453.</ref>
<table style="float" align="right">
<tr><td>[[Image:Persecution of Roma (Gypsies) in 1939-1945.gif|thumb|250px|Map of persecution of Roma (Gypsies)]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:Porajmos.jpg|thumb|250px|Roma arrivals in the [[Belzec extermination camp]], 1940.]]
</td></tr>
</table>
Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Roma and Sinti in Nazi-controlled Europe.<ref name=Niewyk47/> Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.<ref name=Berenbaum126>Berenbaum, Michael. ''The World Must Know'', United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 126.</ref> A detailed study by the late Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000, and possibly closer to 500,000.<ref>cited in [http://www.nyed.uscourts.gov/pub/rulings/cv/1996/685455.pdf Re. Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (Swiss Banks) Special Master's Proposals, September 11, 2000]).</ref><ref>[http://www.holocaust-trc.org/sinti.htm "Sinti and Roma"], United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref> [[Ian Hancock]], Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.<ref>[[Ian Hancock|Hanock, Ian]]. [http://www.radoc.net:8088/RADOC-3-PORR.htm "Romanies and the Holocaust: A Reevaluation and an Overview"], published in Stone, D. (ed.) (2004) ''The Historiography of the Holocaust''. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York.</ref> Hancock writes that, proportionately, the death toll equaled "and almost certainly exceed[ed], that of Jewish victims."<ref>Hancock, Ian. [http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Histories__Narratives__Documen/Roma___Sinti__Gypsies_/Jewish_Responses_to_the_Porraj/jewish_responses_to_the_porraj.html Jewish Responses to the Porajmos (The Romani Holocaust)], Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota.</ref>
{{rquote|left|''''' ... they wish to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened and which anyway had to be destroyed. ''''' — [[Emmanuel Ringelblum]] on the Roma.<ref>Kermish, Joseph. (ed.) {{PDFlink|[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%203727.pdf "Emmanuel Ringblaum's Notes, Hitherto Unpublished"]}}, , ''Yad Vashem Studies VII, Jerusalem 1968, pp. 177-178.</ref>}}

Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into [[ghetto]]s, including several hundred into the [[Warsaw Ghetto]].<ref name=USHMMDeportationsWarsaw>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005413 "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto"], United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref> Further east, teams of [[Einsatzgruppen]] tracked down Roma encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also victimized by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Nazis, especially the [[Ustashe]] regime in Croatia; in [[Jasenovac concentration camp]], tens of thousands of Roma were killed.

In May 1942, the Roma were placed under the same labor and social laws as the Jews, and on [[December 16]], [[1942]], Himmler issued a decree that "Gypsy ''Mischlinge'' (mixed breeds), Roma Gypsies, and members of the clans of Balkan origins who are not of German blood" should be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht.<ref name=BauerRoma444>[[Yehuda Bauer|Bauer, Yehuda]]. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp''. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 444.</ref> On January 29, 1943, another decree ordered the deportation of all German Gypsies to Auschwitz.

This was adjusted on [[November 15]], [[1943]], when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies (''Mischlinge'') are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."<ref name=BauerRoma445>[[Yehuda Bauer|Bauer, Yehuda]]. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp''. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 445.</ref> Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Roma, originally an [[Aryan]] population, had been "spoiled" by non-Romani blood.<ref name=BauerRoma446>[[Yehuda Bauer|Bauer, Yehuda]]. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp''. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 446.</ref>

====Disabled and mentally ill====
{{Quotation|
:*[[Aktion T4]], [[Erbkrank]], [[Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring]], [[Rhineland Bastard]], [[Schloss Hartheim]]}}
[[Image:EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg|thumb||left|180px|"60,000 [[Reichsmark|RM]] is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow Germans,<ref>The word translated here as "fellow Germans" is ''Volkesgenosse'', a term used by the Nazis to signify pure German blood. The ''Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei'' 1920 manifesto stated: "''Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf die Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein."'' ("Citizens must be Volksgenosse. Volksgenosse must be of German blood... No Jew can be Volksgenosse.")</ref> that's your money too ..."<ref>Poster advertising ''Neues Volk'', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the [[NSDAP]].</ref>]]
{{rquote|right|
'''''Our starting point is not the individual:'''''
'''''We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked...Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.''''' — [[Joseph Goebbels]], 1938.<ref>[http://isurvived.org/TOC-I.html Holocaust Remembrance Network].</ref>}}
''Aktion T4'' was a program established in 1939 to maintain the genetic purity of the German population by killing or sterilizing German and Austrian citizens who were disabled or suffering from mental illness.<ref>[[Ian Kershaw|Kershaw, Ian]]. ''Hitler'', volume II, Norton 2000, p. 430.</ref>

Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and 1,000 Jews in institutions.<ref name=Lifton142>Lifton, Robert J. ''The Nazi Doctors" Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide''. London: Papermac, 1986 (reprinted 1990) p. 142.</ref> Outside the mental health instituations, the figures are estimated as 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of [[Schloss Hartheim]], one of the euthanasia centers) or 400,000 (according to Frank Zeireis, the commandant of [[Mauthausen concentration camp]]).<ref name=Lifton142/> Another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized.<ref name=Neugebauer>Neugebauer, Wolfgang. [http://www.doew.at/information/mitarbeiter/beitraege/rachyg.html "Racial Hygiene in Vienna 1938"], ''Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift'', special edition, March 1998.</ref>

The program was named after [[Tiergartenstraße]] 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of [[Tiergarten]], the headquarters of the ''Gemeinnnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege'' (General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care),<ref>[[Gitta Sereny|Sereny, Gitta]]. ''Into That Darkness'', Pimlico 1974, p. 48.</ref> led by [[Philipp Bouhler]], head of Hitler’s private chancellery (''Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP'') and [[Karl Brandt (Nazi physician)|Karl Brandt]], Hitler’s personal physician.

Brandt was tried in December 1946 at [[Nuremberg Trials|Nuremberg]], along with 22 others, in a case known as United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al., also known as the [[Doctors' Trial]]. He was hanged at [[Landsberg Prison]] on [[June 2]], [[1948]].

====Gay men====
{{quotation|
:*Further information: [[Black triangle (badge)|Black triangle]], [[Institut für Sexualwissenschaft]], [[Pink triangle]], [[History of homosexual people in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust]].}}
<table style="float" align="right">
<tr><td>
[[Image:ac.homomonument.jpg|thumb|225px|right|The [[Homomonument]] in Amsterdam, a memorial to the gay victims of Nazi Germany.]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:Liberté chérie2.jpg|right|thumb|225px|A memorial for ''Loge Liberté chérie'', founded in November 1943 in Hut 6 of Emslandlager VII (KZ Esterwegen), the only Masonic lodge founded in a Nazi concentration camp.]]
</td></tr>
</table>
Between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men are estimated to have died in concentration camps.<ref name=Chronicle108>''The Holocaust Chronicle'', Publications International Ltd., p. 108.</ref> James D. Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the ''"gesundes Volksempfinden"'' ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal principle.<ref name=Steakley>Steakley, James. [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/steakley-nazis.html "Homosexuals and the Third Reich"], ''The Body Politic'', Issue 11, January/February 1974.</ref> In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion." Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment,"<ref name=Chronicle108/> and gay men were regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.<ref name=Chronicle108/><ref name=Steakley/>

Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation," where they were identified by yellow armbands<ref name=EBnon-Jews/> and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right pant leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse.<ref name=Steakley/> Hundreds were castrated by court order.<ref>Giles, Geoffrey J. "The Most Unkindest Cut of All': Castration, Homosexuality and Nazi Justice," ''Journal of Contemporary History'', Vol. 27, No. 1, (January 1992): pp. 41-61.</ref> They were humiliated, tortured, used in [[hormone]] experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed. The allegation of homosexuality was also used as a convenient way of dealing with Catholic priests.<ref name=Chronicle108/> Steakley writes that the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany and elsewhere in Europe.<ref name=Steakley/>

====Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses ====
{{Quotation|
:*Further information: [[Freemasonry under Totalitarian Regimes#Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe|Freemasonry and Nazi Germany]], [[Liberté chérie (Freemasonry)|Liberté chérie]], [[Nacht und Nebel]], [[Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses]].}}
In ''[[Mein Kampf]]'', Hitler wrote that Freemasonry had "succumbed" to the Jews: "The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish press."<ref>Hitler, Adolf. ''Mein Kampf'', pp. 315 and 320.</ref> Freemasons were sent to concentration camps as political prisoners, and forced to wear an inverted ''[[Nazi concentration camp badges|red triangle]]''.<ref>Katz, ''Jews and Freemasons in Europe''cited in ''The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'', volume 2, page 531.</ref> It is estimated that between 80,000 and 200,000 were killed.<ref name="Dummies">''Freemasons for Dummies'', [http://members.aol.com/brlodge/whymasons.html Christopher Hodapp], Hungry Minds Inc, U.S., 2005.</ref><ref> [http://mill-valley.freemasonry.biz/persecution.htm Documented evidence from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum pertaining to the persecution of the Freemasons] accessed May 21, 2006.</ref><ref>RSHA Amt VII, ''Written Records'', overseen by Professor [[Franz Six]], was responsible for "ideological" tasks, by which was meant the creation of antisemitic and anti-masonic propaganda.</ref>

Refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 [[Jehovah's Witnesses]] were forced to wear a purple star and placed in camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. Between 2,500 and 5,000 were killed.<ref name=Shulman> Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."<ref>''Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses During the Nazi-Regime 1933-1945'' ''Social Disinterest, Governmental Disinformation, Renewed Persecution, and Now Manipulation of History?'' p. 251.</ref>

==Development and execution==
===Origins===
[[Image:Israel'sDepartmentStoreboycott.jpg|right|thumb|300px|At 10 a.m. on [[April 1]], [[1933]], members of the ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' moved into place all over Germany, positioning themselves outside Jewish-owned businesses to deter customers. These stormtroopers are outside [[Israel's Department Store]] in Berlin. The signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews." ("''Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!''")<ref name=boycotts>[http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Educational_Resources/Curriculum/Broken_Threads/Boycotts/boycotts.html "Boycotts"], Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, [[University of Minnesota]], retrieved September 6, 2006.</ref> The store was ransacked during [[Kristallnacht]] in 1938, then handed over to a non-Jewish family.]]
The [[Nazi Party]] under [[Adolf Hitler]] came to power in Germany in January 1933, and persecution of German Jews began almost immediately, causing about half of all German Jews to leave the country before 1939. During the 1930s, the legal, economic and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted, and many Jews, particularly political and intellectual leaders, were sent to [[concentration camps]], where most of them were eventually killed or died. Before 1939, however, there was no systematic killing of Jews either in Germany or in [[Austria]]. Most of the Austrian Jews, for example, were allowed to emigrate, minus their possessions, by the Nazi official in charge of Jewish emigration, [[Adolf Eichmann]].

In his autobiography ''[[Mein Kampf]]'' (1925), Hitler was open about his hatred of Jews and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual and cultural life. He did not actually say that if he came to power he would attempt to exterminate the Jews, but he was more explicit in private. As early as 1922 he told Major Josef Hell: "The annihilation (''vernichtung'') of the Jews will be my first and foremost task." He said that he would personally hang all the Jews of [[Munich]]. "Exactly the same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of its last Jew." [http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/annihilation.html]

In 1935, Hitler introduced the [[Nuremberg Laws]], which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the laws, Hitler said that if they were "insufficient" in solving the "Jewish question," it would be necessary to pass a law "handing over the problem to the National Socialist Party for final solution (''Endlösung'')." This expression became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. In January 1939, he said in a public speech: "If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (''vernichtung'') of the Jewish race in Europe."<ref>Berenbaum, Michael. ''The World Must Know'', p. 57.</ref> There is no documentary evidence that Hitler ordered the preparation of a concrete plan for exterminating the Jews. The most likely originator of such a plan was [[Heinrich Himmler]], head of the Nazi paramilitary force (the [[SS]]), a fanatical antisemite and Hitler's most trusted lieutenant.

The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they occupied the eastern half of [[Poland]], home to about two million Jews. Himmler's right-hand man, [[Reinhard Heydrich]], reported to Himmler on how to deal with the situation. He recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in [[ghetto|ghettos]] in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich's words, "future measures can be accomplished more easily."<ref name=Padfield270>Padfield, Peter. ''Himmler: Reichsfuhrer SS''. Macmillian 1990, p. 270. Padfield gives as his source for both the Heydrich quote and Eichmann's comment on it J von Lang and C Sybill (eds) ''Eichmann Interrogated''. Bodley Head, London 1982, pp. 92-93.</ref> During his interrogation in 1961, [[Adolf Eichmann]] testified that the expression "future measures" was understood to mean "physical extermination."<ref name=Padfield270/>

===Increasing persecution and pogroms (1938–1942)===
{{Quotation|
:*''[[Pogrom]]s and massacres: [[Babi Yar]], [[Dorohoi Pogrom]], [[Iaşi pogrom]], [[Jedwabne Massacre]], [[Kristallnacht]], [[Legionnaires' Rebellion and Bucharest Pogrom]], [[History of Lviv#Lviv pogroms and the Holocaust|Lviv pogroms]], [[Ponary massacre]], [[Odessa massacre]].''}}
[[Image:1938 Interior of Berlin synagogue after Kristallnacht.jpg|left|thumb|250px|Berlin's [[Fasanenstrasse synagogue]] after [[Kristallnacht]], November 9-10, 1938.]]
Many scholars date the start of the Holocaust to the anti-Jewish riots of ''[[Kristallnacht]]'', the Night of Broken Glass, on [[November 9]], [[1938]], in which Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,668 [[synagogues]] (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Vienna.

A number of deadly [[pogrom]]s by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the [[Iaşi pogrom]] in Romania on [[June 30]], [[1941]], in which as many 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police, and the [[Jedwabne massacre|Jedwabne pogrom]], in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by local Poles in July 1941.

===Early measures in Poland===
{{Quotation|
:*Further information: [[Armia Krajowa]], [[History of the Jews in Poland]], [[History of Poland (1939–1945)]], [[Invasion of Poland (1939)|Invasion of Poland]], [[Polish government in Exile]].}}
<table style="float" align="right">
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[[Image:Germany1941.png|right|thumb|300px|Germany 1941, including occupied Poland and the [[General Government]] area.]]</td></tr>
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[[Image:GermanPoliceTormentingJew.JPG|right|thumb|300px|German policemen tormenting a Jew in Rzeszow, Poland.]]
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{{rquote|left|'''''I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.|
[[Hans Frank]], Nazi governor of Poland.'''''<ref name=holorem1/><ref name=histpl1>{{cite web|url=http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/warsaw.htm|title=The Warsaw Ghetto|accessdate=2007-05-05}}</ref>}}
Germany invaded Poland on [[September 1]], [[1939]], leading Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and France to declare war. [[Hans Frank]], a German lawyer, was appointed Governor-General in October.<ref>Frank was prosecuted during the [[Nuremberg trials]] and was found guilty of complicity in the murder of millions of Poles (Jews and non-Jews). He was executed on [[October 16]] [[1946]].</ref>

In September, Himmler appointed [[Reinhard Heydrich]] head of the [[RSHA|Reich Security Head Office]] (''Reichssicherheitshauptamt'' or RSHA), a body overseeing the work of the SS, the Security Police (SD), and the [[Gestapo]] in occupied Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich's report. (This body should not be confused with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation of Jews.) The Jews were herded into ghettos, mostly in the [[General Government]] area of central Poland, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Saukel. Here many thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression ''Vernichtung durch Arbeit'' ("destruction through work") was frequently used.

When the Germans occupied Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, antisemitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The [[Vichy France|Vichy]] regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland introduced no anti-Jewish measures at all, and Hungary did so only after the country was occupied by Germany in 1944. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative.

During 1940 and 1941, the killing of large numbers of Jews in Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the "[[Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia]]" (today's [[Czech Republic]]) to Poland was undertaken. Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories, although the deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly [[Berlin]], was not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to survive in hiding — it is a paradox of the Holocaust that Berlin was one of the few places where this was possible.) By December 1939, 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government area.

The Governor-General, [[Hans Frank]], noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them." It was this dilemma which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. This method had already been used during Hitler's campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as "T4"). SS ''Obersturmführer'' [[Christian Wirth]] seems to have been the inventor of the [[gas chamber]].

Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS hierarchy led by Himmler and Heydrich was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there were important centers of opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime. The grounds for the opposition were mainly economic, not humanitarian. [[Hermann Göring]], who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army's Economics Department, representing the armaments industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the General Government area (more than a million able-bodied workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union.

Some parts of the German army disapproved of atrocities against Jews on principle, and during this period there were frequent conflicts between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately, neither Göring nor the army leadership was willing or able to challenge Himmler's authority, particularly since Himmler made it clear he had Hitler's support.

===Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)===
<table style="float" align="right">
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[[Image:Mauthausen-quarry.jpg|right|thumb|240px|Prisoners in Austria's [[Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp]] climbing the 186 steps of the Stairway of Death, carrying stone slabs. Around 44,000 inmates are believed to have died there,<ref>Dobosiewicz, Stanisław. ''Mauthausen-Gusen; w obronie życia i ludzkiej godności''. Warsaw: Bellona, 2000, p. 421.</ref> an example of [[extermination through labour]].]]
</td></tr>
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[[Image:Rows of bodies of dead inmates fill the yard of Lager Nordhausen, a Gestapo concentration camp.jpg|right|thumb|240px|[[April 12]], [[1945]]: [[Mittelbau-Dora|Lager Nordhausen]], where 20,000 inmates are believed to have died.]]
</td></tr>
</table>
{{quotation|
:*''Further information: [[Extermination through labour]], [[List of Nazi German concentration camps]], [[Nazi concentration camps]], [[Nazi concentration camp badges]].''
:*''The major concentration and extermination camps: [[Auschwitz]], [[Belzec]], [[Bergen-Belsen concentration camp|Bergen-Belsen]], [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]], [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]], [[Flossenbürg concentration camp|Flossenbürg]], [[Grini]], [[Jasenovac]], [[Klooga concentration camp|Klooga]], [[Majdanek]], [[Maly Trostenets extermination camp|Maly Trostinets]], [[Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp|Mauthausen-Gusen]], [[Ravensbrück concentration camp|Ravensbrück]], [[Treblinka]].''
:*''Camp badges: [[Black triangle]], [[Pink triangle]], [[Purple triangle]], [[Yellow badge]].}}
Leading up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis began intensifying acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition. With the cooperation of local authorities, they set up camps as concentration centers within Germany. One of the first was [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]], which opened in March 1933. These early camps were meant to hold, torture, or kill only political prisoners, such as Communists and Social Democrats. <ref name="CampTimeline">{{cite web|url=http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/timeline/camps.htm|title=Holocaust Timeline: The Camps|work=A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust|publisher=University of South Florida|accessdate=2007-01-06}}</ref>

These early prisons — usually basements and storehouses — were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside the cities. By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland.<ref name="CampTimeline" /> After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or forced to live as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.<ref>{{cite book |last= Harran|first=Marilyn |title=The Holocaust Chronicles, A History in Words and Pictures |year=2000 |publisher=Louis Weber |pages=Pg.321|isbn=0-7853-2963-3}}</ref> It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries, many of them in Poland.<ref>[http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html "Concentration Camp Listing"], Jewish Virtual Library.</ref><ref>[http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/ "The Forgotten Camps"].</ref>

New camps were focused on areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination.

While not designed as a method for systematic extermination, many concentration camp prisoners died because of harsh conditions or were eventually executed. Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners with a prisoner ID.<ref>{{cite book |last= Harran|first=Marilyn |title=The Holocaust Chronicles, A History in Words and Pictures |year=2000 |publisher=Louis Weber |pages=Pg.461|isbn=0-7853-2963-3}}</ref> Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14 hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of exposure.<ref name="NormalDay">[http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/DayEng.html "Just a Normal Day in the Camps", JewishGen, January 6, 2007.]</ref>

===Ghettos (1940–1945)===
{{Quotation|
:*''Further information: [[Emanuel Ringelblum]], [[Judenrat]], [[Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944]], [[Oyneg Shabbos (group)|Oyneg Shabbos]]''
:*''Main ghettos: [[Cluj Ghetto]], [[Kraków Ghetto]], [[Lakhva|Łachwa Ghetto]], [[Łódź Ghetto]], [[Lwów Ghetto]], [[Theresienstadt Ghetto]], [[Warsaw Ghetto]], [[Wilna Ghetto]]''}}
[[Image:Childwarsawghetto.jpg|thumb|250px|left|A child dying in the streets of the crowded [[Warsaw Ghetto]], where hunger and disease killed 43,000 in 1941 alone.<ref name=USHMMDeportationsWarsaw/>]]
After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis established [[ghetto]]s throughout 1941 and 1942 to which Jews and some Roma were confined, until they were eventually shipped to death camps and killed. The [[Warsaw Ghetto]] was the largest, with 380,000 people, and the [[Łódź Ghetto]] the second largest, holding 160,000. They were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons, described by Michael Berenbaum as instruments of "slow, passive murder."<ref name=Berenbaum114>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know'', [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]], 2006, p. 114.</ref> Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 400,000 people<ref name=USHMMDeportationsWarsaw/> — 30% of the population of Warsaw — it occupied only 2.4% of the city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room.

From 1940 through 1942, starvation and disease, especially [[typhoid fever|typhoid]], killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941,<ref name=USHMMDeportationsWarsaw/> more than one in ten; in [[Theresienstadt]], more than half the residents died in 1942.<ref name=Berenbaum114/>
{{rquote|right|'''''The Germans came, the police, and they started banging houses: "''Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus''." ... [O]ne baby started to cry ... The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet ... [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead ... from fear, the mother [had] choked her own baby ...''''' — Abraham Malik, describing his experience in the [[Kaunas|Kovno]] ghetto.<ref>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know'', [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]], 2006, p. 115-116.</ref>}}

Each ghetto was run by a ''[[Judenrat]]'' (Jewish council) of German-appointed Jewish community leaders, who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the provision of food, water, heat, medicine, and shelter, and who were also expected to make arrangements for deportations to extermination camps. Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the deportations on [[July 19]], [[1942]], and three days later, on July 22, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until September 12, 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were transported in freight trains to the [[Treblinka extermination camp]]. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated.

Berenbaum writes that the defining moment that tested the courage and character of each ''Judenrat'' came when they were asked to provide a list of names of the next group to be deported. The ''Judenrat'' members went through the tried and tested methods of delay, bribery, stonewalling, pleading, and argumentation, until finally a decision had to be made. Some argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who ''could'' be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed; others argued, following [[Maimonides]], that not a single individual should be handed over who had not committed a capital crime. ''Judenrat'' leaders such as Dr. Joseph Parnas in [[Lviv]], who refused to compile a list, were shot. On [[October 14]], [[1942]], the entire ''Judenrat'' of Byaroza committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.<ref>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know'', United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, pp. 81-83.</ref>

The first [[ghetto uprising]] occurred in September 1942 in the small town of [[Lakhva|Łachwa]] in southeast Poland. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the larger ghettos in 1943, such as the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]] and the [[Białystok Ghetto Uprising]], in every case they failed against the Nazi military, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the camps, which the Germans euphemistically called "resettlement in the East."<ref>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know'', United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, p 116.</ref>

===Death squads (1941–1943)===
{{main|Einsatzgruppen}}
[[Image:Einsatzgruppen Killing.jpg|230px|thumb|right|A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in [[Vinnitsa]], [[Ukraine]], in 1942. Present in the background are members of the [[Wehrmacht|German Army]], the German Labor Service, and the [[Hitler Youth]].<ref name=Berenbaum93>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know''. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2nd edition, 2006, p. 93.</ref> The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa".]]
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase. The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine, and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov, contained about four million Jews, including hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939. Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, and about a million succeeded in escaping further east. The remaining three million were left at the mercy of the Nazis.

In these territories, there were fewer restraints on the mass killing of Jews than there were in countries like France or the Netherlands, where there was a long tradition of tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland where, despite a strong tradition of antisemitism, there was considerable resistance to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews. In the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine, native antisemitism was reinforced by hatred of Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews. Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination camps. [[Raul Hilberg]] writes that these were ordinary citizens, not hoodlums or thugs; the great majority were university-educated professionals.<ref>[[Raul Hilberg|Hilberg, Raul]] cited in [[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know''. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, John Hopkins University Press, 2nd edition, 2006, p. 93.</ref> They used their skills to become efficient killers, according to [[Michael Berenbaum]].<ref name=Berenbaum93/>

Despite the subservience of the Army high command to Hitler, Himmler did not trust the Army to approve of, let alone carry out, the large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This task was assigned to SS formations called ''[[Einsatzgruppen]]'' ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organized on a much larger scale. ''Einsatzgruppe'' A (commanded by SS-''Brigadeführer'' Franz Stahlecker was assigned to the Baltic area, ''Einsatzgruppe'' B (SS-''Brigadeführer'' [[Artur Nebe]]) to Belarus, ''Einsatzgruppe'' C (SS-''Gruppenführer'' [[Otto Rasch]]) to north and central Ukraine, and ''Einsatzgruppe'' D (SS-''Gruppenführer'' [[Otto Ohlendorf]]) to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus.

According to Ohlendorf at his trial, "the ''Einsatzgruppen'' had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians (not a single ''Einsatzgruppe'' member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the four ''Einsatzgruppen'' listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000, and 55,000 people — a total of 300,000 people — mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns.

The [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on [[April 6]], [[1942]], the second day of [[Passover]]:

{{Quotation|I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil ... His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" ... A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.<ref name=Berenbaum93/>}}

The most notorious masasacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called [[Babi Yar]] outside Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29-30, 1941. The killing of all the Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor (Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt) the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-''Obergruppenführer'' [[Friedrich Jeckeln]]) and the ''Einsatzgruppe'' C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police.

On Monday the Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene:
{{rquote|left|'''''Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 08:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.''''' — Order posted in Kiev in Russian and Ukrainian, on or around September 26, 1941.<ref name=Berenbaum97>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know'', United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, pp. 97-98.</ref>}}{{Quotation|[O]ne after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear ... Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep ... When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the ''Schutzpolizei'' and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot ... The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun ... I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other ... The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.<ref name=Berenbaum97/>}}

[[Image:Heinrich Himmler, Richard Heydrich, Karl Wolf.JPG|thumb|left|230px|[[Karl Wolff]] (second from the right) with [[Heinrich Himmler]] (far left) at the [[Berghof (Hitler)|Obersalzberg]], May 1939. Wolf wrote in his diary that Himmler had vomited after witnessing the mass shooting of 100 Jews.<ref name=Issacs>Issacs, Jeremy. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/otherlives/story/0,,1954580,00.html "Susan McConachy'], ''The Guardian'', November 23, 2006.</ref>]]

In August 1941 Himmler travelled to [[Minsk]] where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by SS-''Obergruppenführer'' [[Karl Wolff]] in his diary. "Himmler's face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up on to it. Then he vomited." After recovering his composure, he lectured the SS men on the need to follow the "highest moral law of the Party" in carrying out their tasks.

By the end of 1941, however, the ''Einsatzgruppen'' had killed only 15 percent of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and it was apparent that these methods could not be used to kill all the Jews of Europe. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, experiments with killing Jews in the back of vans using gas from the van's exhaust had been carried out, and when this proved too slow, more lethal gasses were tried. For large-scale killing by gas, however, fixed sites would be needed, and it was decided — probably by Heydrich and Eichmann — that the Jews should be brought to camps specifically built for the purpose.

In the summer of 1941, [[Rudolf Höss]], the commandant of the [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz-Birkenau]] labor camp 60km south of [[Krakow]], was told to prepare a much larger camp to be used solely for killing by gas. Himmler told him: "The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to execute the order...I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose."<ref name=holorem1>{{cite web|url=http://www.eastrenfrewshire.gov.uk/holocaust/holocaust_remembrance_2004_-_holocausts/holocaust_remembrance_2004_-_the_nazi_holocaust/holocaust_remembrance_2004_-_the_final_solution.htm|title=The Final Solution|accessdate=2007-05-05}}</ref> The first gassings, using an industrial gas derived from [[prussic acid]] and known by the brand name [[Zyklon-B]], were carried out at Auschwitz in September.

===Wannsee Conference and the final solution (1942–1945)===
{{Quotation|
:*''Further information: [[Operation Reinhard]], [[Wannsee Conference]].''
:*''Those present at the conference: [[Josef Bühler]], [[Adolf Eichmann]], [[Roland Freisler]], [[Reinhard Heydrich]], [[Otto Hofmann]], [[Gerhard Klopfer]], [[Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger]], [[Rudolf Lange]], [[Georg Leibbrandt]], [[Martin Luther (diplomat)|Martin Luther]], [[Heinrich Müller]], [[Erich Neumann]], [[Karl Eberhard Schöngarth]], [[Wilhelm Stuckart]]''}}
<table style="float" align="right">
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[[Image:Wannsee-room.jpg|right|thumb|240px|The dining room of the Wannsee villa, where the [[Wannsee conference]] took place. The 15 men seated at the table on January 20, 1942 to discuss the "final solution of the Jewish question"<ref name=Heydrichletter>[http://www.ghwk.de/engl/february-26-1942.htm Letter from Reinhard Heydrich to Martin Luther, Foreign Office, February 26, 1942, regarding the minutes of the [[Wannsee Conference]].</ref>were considered the best and the brightest in the Reich.<ref name=Berenbaum101/>]]
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[[Image:PICT4612.JPG|right|thumb|240px|Facsimiles of the minutes of the [[Wannsee Conference]]. This page lists the number of Jews in every European country.]]
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[[Image:Arbeit-auschwitz04.jpg|right|thumb|240px|[[Auschwitz#Auschwitz_I|Auschwitz I]] ]]
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[[Image:Rail leading to Auschwitz II (Birkenau).jpg|right|thumb|240px|The railway line leading to the death camp at [[Auschwitz#Auschwitz II (Birkenau)|Auschwitz II (Birkenau)]].]]
</td></tr>
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[[Image:Holocaust-gas-hair.jpg|thumb|240px|right|Empty poison gas canisters used to kill inmates and piles of hair shaven from their heads are stored in the museum at [[Auschwitz#Auschwitz II (Birkenau)|Auschwitz II]].]]
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[[Image:GaschamberAuschwitz.jpg|thumb|240px|right|A gas chamber in Auschwitz immediately after liberation, January 1945.]]
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[[Image:Gas chambers ruins.JPG|thumb|240px|right|What remains of the gas chambers at [[Auschwitz#Auschwitz II (Birkenau)|Auschwitz II (Birkenau)]]; photographed in 2006.]]
</td></tr>
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[[Image:Holocaust123.JPG|thumb|240px|Corpses in Auschwitz; from [[Yad Vashem]].]]
</td></tr>
</table>
By the end of 1941, Himmler and Heydrich were increasingly impatient with the progress of the Final Solution. Their main opponent was Göring, who had succeeded in exempting Jewish industrial workers from the orders to deport all Jews to the General Government and who had allied himself with the Army commanders who were opposing the extermination of the Jews out of mixture of economic calculation, distaste for the SS and (in some cases) humanitarian sentiment. Although Göring's power had declined since the defeat of his [[Luftwaffe]] in the [[Battle of Britain]], he still had privileged access to Hitler and had great obstructive power.

Heydrich therefore convened a conference — the [[Wannsee Conference]] — on [[January 20]], [[1942]] at a villa, ''Am Großen Wannsee'' No. 56-58, in the suburbs of Berlin to finalize a plan for the extermination of the Jews.<ref name=Wannseeprotocol>[http://www.ghwk.de/engl/protengl.htm Protocol of the Wannsee Conference], ''Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz''.</ref> The plan became known (after Reinhard Heydrich) as ''Aktion Reinhard'' (Operation Reinhard). Present were Heydrich, Eichmann, [[Heinrich Müller]] (head of the Gestapo), and representatives of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry for the Interior, the Four Year Plan Office, the Ministry of Justice, the General Government in Poland (where over two million Jews still lived), the Foreign Office, the Race and Resettlment Office, and the Nazi Party, and the office responsible for distributing Jewish property.<ref name=Berenbaum101>[[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]]. ''The World Must Know'', United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, p. 101-102.</ref> Also present was SS-''Sturmbannführer'' [[Rudolf Lange]], the SD commander in [[Riga]], who had recently carried out the liquidation of the Riga ghetto.<ref name=Wannseeprotocol/> He seems to have been there to advise the officials on the practicalities of killing people on an industrial scale.

[[Michael Berenbaum]] writes that the 15 men seated at the table were considered the best and the brightest; more than half of them held doctorates from German universities. Butlers served brandy as they talked.<ref name=Berenbaum101/>

The men were presented with a plan for killing all the Jews in Europe, including 330,000 Jews in England and 4,000 in Ireland,<ref name=Wannseeprotocol/> although the minutes taken by Eichmann refer to this only through euphemisms, such as " ... emigration has now been replaced by evacuation to the East. This operation should be regarded only as a provisional option, though in view of the coming final solution of the Jewish question it is already supplying practical experience of vital importance."<ref name=Wannseeprotocol/>

The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to 5 million in the Soviet Union (although only 3 million of these were in areas under German occupation) - a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to [[extermination camp|extermination camps]] (''Vernichtungslager'') in Poland, where those unfit for work would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring's representative, Dr. [[Erich Neumann]], gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.

====Extermination camps====
{| class="wikitable" align="right" style="margin-left:1em;font-size:80%"
|+Approx. number killed at each [[extermination camp]] (Source: [[Yad Vashem]]<ref>[http://www.yadvashem.org/ Yad Vashem], Accessed [[May 7]], [[2007]]</ref>)
|-
! Camp name !! Killed !! Ref.
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz II]]
| align="right"|1,400,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvsau/><ref>Per [http://www1.yadvashem.org/education/lessonplan/english/auschwitz/auschwitz.htm], Auschwitz II total numbers are "between 1.3M-1.5M", so we use the middle value 1.4M as estimate here.</ref>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Belzec]]
| align="right"|600,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvsbe/>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Chelmno extermination camp|Chelmno]]
| align="right"|320,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvsch/>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Jasenovac concentration camp|Jasenovac]]
| align="right"|600,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvsja/>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Majdanek]]
| align="right"|360,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvsmaj/>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Maly Trostinets]]
| align="right"|65,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvsmal/>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Sobibór]]
| align="right"|250,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvsso/>
|-
! style="text-align: left"|[[Treblinka]]
| align="right"|870,000 || style="text-align: center"|<ref name=yvstr/>
|}
During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (''Vernichtungslager'') for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan. Two of these, at [[Chelmno]] (also known as Kulmhof) and [[Majdanek]] were already functioning as labor camps: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at [[Belzec]], [[Sobibór]] and [[Treblinka]]. A seventh camp, at [[Maly Trostinets]] in Belarus, was also used for this purpose. [[Jasenovac concentration camp|Jasenovac]] was an extermination camp where mostly ethnic [[Serbs]] were killed.

Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]] and [[Belsen]], which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists and homosexuals). They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing.

{{rquote|left|'''''There was a place called the ramp where the trains with the Jews were coming in. They were coming in day and night, and sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day ... Constantly, people from the heart of Europe were disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place with the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. And the people in this mass ... I knew that within a couple of hours ... ninety percent would be gassed.''''' — [[Rudolf Vrba]], who worked on the ''Judenrampe'' in [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]] from August 18, 1942 to June 7, 1943.<ref>[[Rudolf Vrba]] cited in [[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbaum, Michael]], ''The World Must Know'', [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]], p. 114.</ref>}}

The extermination camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries. Regular German soldiers were kept well away.

The method of killing was by poison gas, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. At the pure extermination camps, all the prisoners arrived by train, and were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were taken. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers: usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers so as to avoid panic; they were told to remember where they had put their belongings for the same reason. Once the chamber was full — according to [[Rudolf Höß]], commandant of Auschwitz, bunker 1 held 800 and bunker 2, 1200<ref name=Piper162>[[Franciszek Piper|Piper, Franciszek]]. "Gas chambers and Crematoria," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 162.</ref> — the doors were screwed shut and solid pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents in the side walls, releasing a toxic gas. Those inside died within minutes.<ref name=Piper162/> Joann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testifed after the war that: "Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives (''Lebenskampf'')."<ref name=Piper163>[[Franciszek Piper|Piper, Franciszek]]. "Gas chambers and Crematoria," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 163.</ref>

The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed, gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers, and women's hair was cut.<ref name=Piper163/> The work was done by the ''[[Sonderkommando]]'' prisoners, Jews who hoped to buy themselves a few extra months of life. At first, the bodies were buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, they were dug up and burned. In the spring of 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers.<ref name=Piper164>[[Franciszek Piper|Piper, Franciszek]]. "Gas chambers and Crematoria," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 164.</ref>

{{quotation|Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.|[[Rudolf Höß]], Auschwitz camp commandant, Nuremberg testimony.<ref>[http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1946Hoess.html Modern History Sourcebook: Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz: Testimony at Nuremburg, 1946] Accessed [[May 6]], [[2007]]</ref>}}

At Auschwitz and the other labor camps, prisoners were separated on arrival into those capable of work — that is, fit adults under 50 — and those judged unfit for work. The latter were immediately killed by the methods already described, although the survivors were generally unaware of this. Those kept alive as workers were housed in crowded barracks under conditions of extreme deprivation and harsh discipline. Most of them eventually died of disease, hunger and exhaustion, although many were executed for trivial breaches of discipline, or at the whim of the guards and officers. Few of these prisoners survived more than a year, although there are accounts by prisoners who survived the war as camp workers.

===Jewish resistance===
{{Quotation|
:*''Further information: [[Jewish resistance during the Holocaust]].''
:*''For uprisings: [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]], [[Białystok Ghetto Uprising]], [[Marcinkance Ghetto Uprising]], [[Sobibór extermination camp]], [[Żydowski Związek Walki]], [[Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa]].''
:*''For Jewish partisans, volunteers, and escapees: [[Yitzhak Arad]], [[Bielski partisans]], [[Masha Bruskina]], [[Eugenio Calò]], [[Jewish Brigade]], [[Jewish partisans]], [[Abba Kovner]], [[Dov Lopatyn]], [[Moše Pijade]], [[Haviva Reik]], [[Special Interrogation Group]], [[Hannah Szenes]], [[Rudolf Vrba]], [[Alfréd Wetzler]], [[Simcha Zorin]].''
:*''For how stories were preserved in the Warsaw Ghetto: [[Emanuel Ringelblum]], [[Oyneg Shabbos (group)]].''}}
<table style="float" align="right">
<tr><td>[[Image:Ghetto Uprising Warsaw2.jpg|thumb|280px|An image from the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]].]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:Window jump ghetto Warsaw.jpg|thumb|280px|A man jumping out of a window of a burning house during the Warsaw uprising.]]
</td></tr>
</table>
The failure of pre-war European Jewry to save itself from the Nazis was a powerful factor fuelling militant [[Zionism]] in the postwar years, and since 1948 has stiffened [[Israel]]'s determination to do whatever it thinks necessary to defend itself, even in the teeth of world opinion. Jewish failure to resist the Holocaust has thus become a factor in current political controversy.

There are some examples of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, most notably the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]] of January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks, and killed several hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. This was followed by the rising in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates succeeded in escaping from the camp after overpowering the guards. Two weeks later, there was a rising in the [[Bialystok]] ghetto. In September, there was a short-lived rising in the [[Vilnius]] ghetto. In October, 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. Most of the participants in these risings were killed, but some managed to escape and joined partisan units.

On [[October 7]], [[1944]], the Jewish [[Sonderkommando]]s at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after.

[[Jewish partisans]] (see the list at the top of this section) actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in many countries. The [[Jewish Brigade]], a unit of 5,000 volunteers from the [[British Mandate of Palestine]] fought in the British Army. German-speaking volunteers from the [[Special Interrogation Group]] performed commando and sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the [[Western Desert Campaign]].

In Poland and the occupied Soviet lands, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps and forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups operated, and saved thousands of Jews from extermination. No such opportunities, of course, existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as [[Amsterdam]] or [[Budapest]]. Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit, who were willing moreover to abandon their families to their fate. The strong Jewish sense of family solidarity meant that this was not an option for most Jews, who prefered to die togther rather than be separated.

For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis enouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the [[Reich Association of Jews]] (Reichsvereinigung der Juden) in Germany and the Jewish Councils ([[Judenrat|Judenrate]]) in the Polish urban ghettos. They cunningly held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leaderships so deeply in well-intentioned compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel wrote: "The youth in the Ghettos dreamed about fighting. I believe that although there were many factors that inhibited our responses, the most important factors were isolation and historical conditioning to accepting martyrdom."<ref>Kimel, Alexander. [http://www.kimel.net/resistance3.html "Holocaust Resistance"], accessed May 4, 2007.</ref>

The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and to avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end; the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising only took place when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000 and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible. [[Paul Johnson (writer)|Paul Johnson]] writes: "The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight." {{Fact|date=May 2007}}

The Jewish communities were also systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news from the outside world. The Germans told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps — euphemistically called "resettlement in the East" — and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors to avoid uprisings. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carrying sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed, just as they were not believed when couriers such as [[Jan Karsky]], the Polish resistance fighter, conveyed them to the western Allies.<ref>Wood, Thomas E. & Jankowski, Stanisław M. ''Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust'', 1994.</ref>

===Climax===
[[Image:Himmler45.jpg|thumb|175px|left|SS chief [[Heinrich Himmler]] in 1945. In October 1943, speaking of "the Jewish question," he told senior Nazi officials: "The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth."]]
Heydrich was assassinated in [[Prague]] in June 1942. He was succeeded as head as the RSHA by [[Ernst Kaltenbrunner]]. Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann, under Himmler's close supervision, oversaw the climax of the Final Solution. During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps worked at a furious rate to kill the hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence. At Auschwitz, up to 20,000 people were killed and incinerated every day.

Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettos in the General Government, during 1943 they were liquidated, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the [[Warsaw Ghetto]] in early 1943, provoked the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]], which was suppressed with great brutality. At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally-recruited auxiliaries. In any case, by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory.

Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the [[Battle of Stalingrad]] at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler's authority for his demands. Few people realized that for Hitler and Himmler killing the Jews was more important than winning the war.

In October 1943, Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in [[Poznań|Posen]] ([[Poznan]] in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe.

{{Quotation|I may here in this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question... I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of... We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men - so to speak killing them or ordering them to be killed - and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up... The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth.}}

The audience for this speech included Admiral [[Karl Dönitz]] and Armaments Minister [[Albert Speer]], both of whom successfully claimed at the [[Nuremberg trials]] that they had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials.

The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the Polish ghettos were emptied, but in March 1944, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary, and Eichmann was dispatched to [[Budapest]] to supervise the deportation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews. More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz in the course of the year. The commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months. This operation met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal under which the Hungarian Jews would be spared in exchange for a favorable peace settlement. There were unofficial negotiations in [[Istanbul]] between Himmler's agents, British agents, and representatives of Jewish organizations, and at one point an attempt by Eichmann to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks — the so-called [[:Template:"Blood for goods" proposal|"blood for goods" proposal]] — but there was no real possibility of such a deal being struck (see [[Joel Brand]] and [[Rudolf Kastner]]).

===Escapes, D-Day, publication of news of the death camps (April–June 1944)===
{{Quotation|
:*''Allied landings: [[D-Day]], [[Eastern Front (World War II)]], [[Normandy landings]], [[Western Front (World War II)]]''
:*''Beaches: [[Gold Beach]] (UK), [[Juno Beach]] (Canada), [[Omaha Beach]] (U.S.), [[Pointe du Hoc]] (U.S.), [[Sword Beach]] (UK), [[Utah Beach]] (U.S.)''}}
<table style="float" align="right">
<tr><td>
[[Image:RudolfVrbawithArnostRosin.jpg|right|thumb|240px|[[Bratislava]], June-July 1944. [[Rudolf Vrba]] (right) escaped from Auschwitz on [[April 7]], [[1944]], bringing the first credible news to the world of the mass murder that was taking place here. Arnost Rosin (left), escaped on [[May 27]], [[1944]].<ref name=ConwayWiesenthal>[[John S. Conway|Conway, John S]]. [http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394983 "The first report about Auschwitz"], Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Annual 1 Chapter 07, retrieved September 11, 2006.</ref>]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:1944 NormandyLST.jpg|right|thumb|240px|Troops of the U.S. Army's First Division about to land on [[Omaha Beach]], France, [[June 6]], [[1944]] to begin the invasion of Europe.]]
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
[[Image:Deathmarches-clandestine.jpg|right|thumb|240px|[[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]] inmates on a [[Death marches (Holocaust)|death march]] through a German village, April 1945. As the Soviets approached, the Germans marched inmates away from camps in the east and back into Germany in an effort to hide the evidence.]]
</td></tr>
</table>
Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. The few Auschwitz escapes that succeeded were made possible by the Polish underground inside the camp and local people outside.<ref name=Linn20>[[Ruth Linn|Linn, Ruth]]. ''Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting'', Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 20.</ref> In 1940, the Auschwitz commandant reported that "the local population is fanatically Polish and ... prepared to take any action against the hated SS camp personnel. Every prisoner who managed to escape can count on help the moment he reaches the wall of a first Polish farmstead."<ref name=Swiebocki505>Swiebocki, Henryk. "Prisoner Escapes," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', Indiana University Press and the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]], 1994, p. 505.</ref>

In February 1942, an escaped inmate from the [[Chelmno extermination camp]], Jacob Grojanowski, reached the [[Warsaw Ghetto]], where he gave detailed information about the Chelmno camp to the [[Oyneg Shabbos (group)|Oneg Shabbat]] group. His report, which became known as the [[Grojanowski Report]], was smuggled out of the ghetto through the channels of the Polish underground to the [[Delegatura Sił Zbrojnych na Kraj|Delegatura]], and reached London by June 1942. It is unclear what was done with the report at that point.<ref name=yvsch/><ref>[http://motlc.learningcenter.wiesenthal.org/text/x06/xm0619.html Grojanowski Report]</ref><ref>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206317.pdf Grojanowski Report, Yad Vashem]</ref><ref>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203134.pdf Yad Vashem], "Diaries"</ref>

In April 1943, [[Witold Pilecki]], a member of the Polish underground, escaped from Auschwitz with information that became the basis of a two-part report in August 1943 that was sent to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in London. The report included details about the gas chambers, about "selection," and about the sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau able to burn 10,000 people daily, and that 30,000 people had been gassed in one day. The author wrote: "History knows no parallel of such destruction of human life." [[Raul Hilberg]] writes that the report was filed away with a note that there was no indication as to the reliability of the source.<ref name=Hilberg1212>[[Raul Hilberg|Hilberg, Raul]]. ''The Destruction of the European Jews'', Yale University Press, 2003, p. 1212.</ref>

[[Rudolf Vrba]] and [[Alfred Wetzler]], Jewish inmates, escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching [[Slovakia]]. The 32-page document they dictated to Jewish officials about the mass murder at Auschwitz became known as the [[Vrba-Wetzler report]]. Vrba had a photographic memory, and had worked on the ''Judenrampe'', where Jews disembarked from the trains for "selection" before being to the gas chamber. The level of detail with which he described the transports allowed Slovakian officials to compare his account with their own deportation records, and the corroboration convinced the Allies to take the report seriously.<ref name=Vbra>[[Rudolf Vrba|Vrba, Rudolf]]. ''I Escaped from Auschwitz'', Barricade Books, 2002.</ref><ref name=ConwayWiesenthal/>

Two other Auschwitz inmates, Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz escaped on [[May 27]], [[1944]], arriving in Slovakia on June 6, the day of the [[Battle of Normandy|Normandy landing]] ([[D-Day]]). Hearing about Normandy, they believed the war was over and got drunk to celebrate, using dollars they'd smuggled out of the camp. They were arrested for violating currency laws, and spent eight days in prison, before the ''[[Judenrat]]'' paid their fines. The additional information they offered the Judenrat was added to Vrba and Wetzler's report and became known as the Auschwitz Protocols. They reported that, between [[May 15]] and [[May 27]], [[1944]], 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at Birkenau, and had been killed at an unprecedented rate, with human fat being used to accelerate the burning.<ref>[[Ruth Linn|Linn, Ruth]]. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1752798,00.html "Rudolf Vrba"], ''The Guardian'', April 13, 2006.</ref>

The BBC and ''The New York Times'' published material from the Vrba-Wetzler report on June 15<ref>The BBC first broadcast information from the report on June 18, not June 15, according to [[Ruth Linn]] in ''Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting'', p. 28.</ref> and [[June 20]], [[1944]]. The subsequent pressure from world leaders persuaded [[Miklos Horthy]] to bring the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz to a halt on July 9, saving up to 200,000 Jews from the extermination camps.<ref name=LinnGuardian>[[Ruth Linn|Linn, Ruth]]. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1752798,00.html "Rudolf Vrba"], obituary in ''[[The Guardian]]'', [[April 13]] [[2006]].</ref>

===Death marches (1944–1945)===
{{main|Death marches (Holocaust)}}
By mid 1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from more than 90 percent in Poland to about 25 percent in France. In May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved,"<ref>[http://www.archives.gov/research/captured-german-records/sound-recordings.html "Captured German sound recordings"], The National Archives.</ref> and this was broadly correct. During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and Germany's allies defected or were defeated. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.

At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to [[Gross Rosen]] in [[Silesia]]. Auschwitz itself was closed as the Soviets advanced through Poland. The last 13 prisoners, all women, were killed in Auschwitz II on [[November 25]], [[1944]]; records show they were "''unmittelbar getötet''" ("killed"), leaving open whether they were gassed or otherwise disposed of.<ref>Czech, Danuta (ed) ''Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945'', Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989, pp. 920 and 933, using information from a series called ''Hefte von Auschwitz'', and cited in Kárný, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', p. 564, Indiana University Press and the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]], 1994. The original German is: "25. November Im KL Auschwitz II kommen 24 weibliche Häftlinge ums Leben, von denen 13 unmittelbar getötet werden."</ref>

Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. In October 1944, Himmler, who is believed to have been negotiating a secret deal with the Allies behind Hitler's back, ordered an end to the Final Solution. But the hatred of the Jews in the ranks of the SS was so strong that Himmler's order was generally ignored. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/uia-cgi/uia_query Maps of the main death marches], United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref>

Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 100,000 Jews died during these marches.<ref>[[Martin Gilbert|Gilbert, Martin]]. ''The Oxford Companion to World War II''.</ref>

The largest and best known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 miles) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. [[Elie Wiesel]] and his father, Shlomo, were among the marchers:

{{Quotation|An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering.<br>
Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.<br>
Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.<ref name=N81>[[Elie Wiesel|Wiesel, Elie]]. ''[[Night (book)|Night]]'', p. 81.</ref>}}

===Liberation===
{{Quotation|
:*''Invasion of Germany: [[Battle of Berlin]], [[Death of Adolf Hitler]], [[Prague Offensive]], [[Victory in Europe Day]]''}}
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[[Image:Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, pose in concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria.jpg|left|thumb|200px|Starving prisoners in [[Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp|Mauthausen camp]], Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the U.S. [[80th Division (United States)|80th Infantry Division]] on [[May 7]], [[1945]].]]
</td></tr>
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[[Image:Mass_Grave_Bergen_Belsen_May_1945.jpg|left|thumb|200px|A grave inside [[Bergen-Belsen concentration camp|Bergen-Belsen]], liberated by the British on [[April 15]], [[1945]].]]
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In July 1944, the first major camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets. Visiting the camp on August 27, W.H. Lawrence wrote in ''The New York Times'':

{{Quotation|I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth — the German concentration camp at Maidanek, in which ... as many as 1,500,000 persons from nearly every country in Europe were killed in the last three years ... I have seen the skeletons of bodies the Germans did not have time to burn... I have seen such evidence as bone ash still in the furnaces ... I walked across literally tens of thousands of shoes spread across the floor like grain in a half-filled elevator... I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.<ref>Lawrence, W.H. "Nazi mass killing laid bare in camp," ''The New York Times'', August 30, 1944.</ref>}}

In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive. Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945.
{{rquote|right|'''''We heard a loud voice repeating the same words in English and in German: "Hello, hello. You are free. We are British soldiers and have come to liberate you." These words still resound in my ears.''''' — Hadassah Rosensaft, inmate of [[Bergen-Belsen concentration camp|Bergen-Belsen]].<ref name=Wiesel39>[[Elie Wiesel|Wiesel, Elie]]. ''Ater the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust'', Schocken Books, p. 39.</ref>}}

Camps were also liberated by American and British forces, including [[Bergen-Belsen concentration camp]] on [[April 15]], [[1945]]. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,<ref name=11th>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10006188 "The 11th Armoured Division (Great Britain)"], United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref> 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from [[typhus]] or malnutrition over the following weeks.<ref name=BB>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005224 "Bergen-Belsen"], United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref> The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.<ref name=Wiesel41>[[Elie Wiesel|Wiesel, Elie]]. ''Ater the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust'', Schocken Books, p. 41.</ref>

The BBC's [[Richard Dimbleby]] famously described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen:

{{Quotation|Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms ... He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.<p>

This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.<ref>[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/4445811.stm "Liberation of Belsen"], BBC News, April 15, 1945.</ref>}}

==See also==
====Involvement of other countries and nationals====
{{Quotation|
:''General: [[Évian Conference]], [[Bermuda Conference]], [[International response to the Holocaust]], [[SS_St._Louis#The_Voyage_of_the_Damned|Voyage of the Damned]].''
:''Collaborators: [[The_Holocaust_%28responsibility%29#The_response_of_individual_states|The response of individual states]].''
:''Rescuers: [[Aristides de Sousa Mendes]], [[Chiune Sugihara]], [[List of people who assisted Jews during the Holocaust]], [[List of Righteous Among the Nations by country]], [[Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas]], [[Hugh O'Flaherty]], [[Raoul Wallenberg]], [[Rescue of the Danish Jews]], [[Righteous Among the Nations]], [[Witold Pilecki]], [[Żegota]].''}}

====Aftermath and historiography====
{{Quotation|
:*''General discussion: [[After the Holocaust]], [[Aftermath of World War II]], [[Denazification]].''
:*''Legal response: [[Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide]], [[Doctors' Trial]], [[German war crimes]], [[Nuremberg Trials]], [[Adolf_Eichmann#Trial|Trial of Adolf Eichmann]], [[War crimes of the Wehrmacht]].''
:*''Victims: [[List of victims of Nazism]].''
:*''Survivors: [[List of famous Holocaust survivors]], [[Sh'erit ha-Pletah]], [[Wiedergutmachung]].''
:*''Memorials: [[Holocaust memorials]], [[Yom HaShoah]].''
:*''Cultural, political, and scholarly responses: [[Holocaust denial]], [[Holocaust theology]], [[The Holocaust in art and literature]].''
:*''For the issue of where responsibility for the Holocaust lies: [[The Holocaust (responsibility)]], [[Command responsibility]], and for an account of the [[Historiography|historiographical]] positions: [[Functionalism versus intentionalism]] and [[Historikerstreit]].''
:*''For further resources: [[Holocaust (resources)]].''}}

====Miscellaneous====
{{Quotation|
:*''[[Antiziganism]], [[Aryanization]], [[Bereavement in Judaism]], [[Friedrich Kellner]], [[Ilse Koch]], [[International Holocaust Cartoon Competition]], [[Irma Grese]], [[List of composers associated with The Holocaust]], [[Jews outside Europe under Nazi occupation]], [[Phases of the Holocaust]]''}}

==Notes==
{{reflist|2}}

==Further reading==
External links, references, and other resources are listed at [[Holocaust (resources)]].

{{World War II}}

[[Category:The Holocaust| ]]
[[Category:Judaism]]
[[Category:Genocide]]

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