Jews in 1942. The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews from
Germany and other
German-held territories during
World War II, often with extreme brutality, is known as
the Holocaust. It was carried out primarily by German forces and collaborators, German and non-German. Early in the war, millions of Jews were concentrated in urban
ghettos. In 1941, Jews were massacred, and by December,
Hitler had decided to exterminate all Jews living in Europe at that time. The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946. The extermination of Jews had been a priority to the Nazis, regardless of the consequences. In January 1942, during the
Wannsee Conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "
Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (
Endlösung der Judenfrage) and German
State Secretary Josef Bühler urged conference chairman
Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the
General Government. Jewish populations were systematically deported from the ghettos and the occupied territories to the seven camps designated as
Vernichtungslager (
extermination camps): •
Auschwitz-Birkenau •
Belzec •
Chelmno •
Majdanek •
Maly Trostenets •
Sobibór •
Treblinka In 1978,
Sebastian Haffner wrote that in December 1941, Hitler began to accept the failure of his primary goal—to dominate Europe, after his declaration of war against the United States, and his withdrawal—was compensated for by his secondary goal: the extermination of the Jews. As the Nazi war machine faltered during the war's final years, military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still diverted from the fronts to the death camps. captured by Germans during the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, May 1943 In Polandhome of Europe's largest Jewish community before the warthe Nazis murdered 3 million Jews, about 90 percent of its Jewish population. Although reports of the Holocaust had reached Western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of the mass murder of Jews in Poland was low at the time; the first references in
The New York Times, in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.
Greece,
Yugoslavia,
Hungary,
Lithuania,
Bohemia, the
Netherlands,
Slovakia and
Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; in
Belgium,
Romania,
Luxembourg,
Norway, and
Estonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of the
Soviet Union's Jews were murdered;
France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population,
Italy between 15% and 20%. Denmark evacuated nearly all of its Jews to nearby
neutral Sweden; the
Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many Danish citizens, evacuated 7,220 of the country's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden, in vessels ranging from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the
Nazis. The
Yad Vashem museum has created, in an ongoing collaboration with many partners, a database with 7.5 million personal records on Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Holocaust, as well as those whose fate has yet to be determined. Some people appear in multiple records, and it is estimated that 5 million murdered Jews have been commemorated. The names of more than one million victims remain unknown and are still being collected.
Slavs The
Slavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with many
Poles,
Belarusians,
Russians,
Ukrainians,
Slovenes,
Serbs and others killed by the Nazis. According to
Bohdan Wytwycky, an estimated 3 million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Belarusians were killed by the Nazis for racially-motivated reasons. The Polish victims represented nearly 22 percent of the country's population. Poles were one of Hitler's first extermination targets, as he outlined in a 22 August 1939
speech to
Wehrmacht commanders before the
invasion.
Intelligentsia, socially prominent, and influential people were primarily targeted, although ethnic Poles and other Slavic groups were also killed
en masse. Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps, and the intelligentsia were the first targets of the
Einsatzgruppen death squads. The anti-Polish campaign culminated in
the near-complete destruction of
Warsaw, ordered by Hitler and
Himmler in 1944. The original assumptions of
Generalplan Ost were based on plans to exterminate around 85% (over 20 million) of ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be used as
slaves. According to
Norman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." Nazi ideology viewed ethnic Poles—the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland—as subhuman. After their 1939 invasion of Poland, the Nazis instituted a policy of murdering (or suppressing) the ethnic-Polish elite (including Catholic religious leaders). The Nazi plan for Poland was the nation's destruction, which necessitated attacking the
Polish Church, (particularly in areas annexed by Germany). About the brief period of military control from 1 September to 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "According to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot. Others put the death toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come." Among the persecuted resisters was
Irena Sendler, head of the children's section of
Żegota, who placed more than 2,500 Jewish children in convents, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and homes. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, Sendlerowa was crippled by torture.
Ukrainians Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million
Ukrainian and other gentiles were murdered as part of
Nazi extermination policies in present-day
Ukraine. More Ukrainians were killed fighting the
Wehrmacht in the
Red Army than American, British and French soldiers combined. Original Nazi plans called for the extermination of 65 percent of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the survivors treated as slaves. According to Bohdan Wytwycky, an estimated 3 million Ukrainians were killed by the Nazis for racially-motivated reasons. The ten-year plan would have exterminated, expelled, Germanized or
enslaved most (or all) Ukrainians.
Russians and Soviet POWs During
Operation Barbarossa (the
Axis invasion of the Soviet Union), millions of
Red Army prisoners of war were
summarily executed in the field by German armies (the
Waffen SS in particular), died under inhumane conditions in German
prisoner of war camps, on
death marches, or had been shipped to concentration camps for execution. The Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs by
starvation, exposure, and execution over an eight-month period in 1941–42. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, by the winter of 1941 "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions". 140,000-500,000 Soviet citizens and POWs were murdered in the concentration camps. Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were severely persecuted and endured the treacherous conditions of the
Eastern Front, which spawned atrocities such as the
siege of Leningrad, when 1.2 million civilians died. Thousands of peasant villages across Russia,
Belarus and
Ukraine were annihilated by German troops. During the occupation, the
Leningrad,
Pskov and
Novgorod regions lost about a quarter of their populations. An estimated one-quarter of Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies (including three million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Belarusians) were racially motivated. In 1995, the
Russian Academy of Sciences reported that civilian deaths in the occupied USSR, including Jews, at the hands of the Germans totaled 13.7 million dead (20% of the population of 68 million). The figure includes 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals, 2.2 million deaths of persons deported to Germany as forced labour, and 4.1 million famine and disease deaths. An estimated three million people also died of starvation in unoccupied territory. The losses occurred within the 1946–1991 borders of the USSR, and include territories annexed in 1939–40. The deaths of 8.2 million Soviet civilians, including Jews, were documented by the Soviet
Extraordinary State Commission.
Romani people The Nazi genocide of the
Romani people was ignored by scholars until the 1980s, and opinions continue to differ on its details. According to historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, the genocide of the Romani began later than that of the Jews and a smaller percentage was murdered. Hitler's genocidal campaign against Europe's Romani population involved the application of Nazi "
racial hygiene" (
selective breeding applied to humans). Despite
discriminatory measures, some Romani (including some of Germany's
Sinti and
Lalleri) were spared deportation and death, with the remaining Romani groups suffering a fate similar to that of the Jews. Romani were deported to the Jewish ghettos, were shot by SS
Einsatzgruppen in their villages, or deported and gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. Estimates of the number of Romani victims range from 250,000 to 500,000.
Non-Europeans Black people The Nazis promoted
xenophobia and
racism against all "non-Aryan" races.
African (black) residents of Germany and
black prisoners of war, such as
French colonial troops and
African Americans, were also victims of Nazi racial policy. When the Nazis came to power, hundreds of African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African soldiers brought in during the French occupation, lived in the
Rhineland. In
Mein Kampf, Hitler described the children of marriages to African occupation troops as a contamination of the white race "by
Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe" who were "bastardising the European continent at its core".
Asian and Turkic peoples Japan signed the
Tripartite Pact with Germany and
Italy on 27 September 1940, and was part of the Axis. No
Japanese people were deliberately imprisoned or killed, since they were considered "
honorary Aryans". The same applied to Turks and all other "Ural-Altaic" peoples. ==People with disabilities==