The Holocaust

» Posted by Inês

The Holocaust was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. The Jewish population wasn’t the only target, though. Other groups were also persecuted and killed, like the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, the disabled, homosexual men and political and religious opponents. Most scholars, however, define the Holocaust as genocide of European Jewry alone, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." The total number of victims of Nazi genocidal policies is generally agreed to be between 9 and 11 million.

One of the main forms of killing was the concentration and labour camps, such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. These early camps were meant to hold, torture, or kill only political prisoners. Anne Frank, the 15-year old girl whose diary is known throughout the world, was in the first two along with her sister Margot. By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland. After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews were killed or forced to live as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured. It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries, many of them in Poland. Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners with a prisoner ID. 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. There were also the extermination camps, death marches and gas chambers.

The first major camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on July 23, 1944. Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on January 27, 1945; Buchenwald by the Americans on April 11; Bergen-Belsen by the British on April 15; Dachau by the Americans on April 29; Ravensbrück by the Soviets on the same day; Mauthausen by the Americans on May 5; and Theresienstadt by the Soviets on May 8. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive—7,000 inmates were found in Auschwitz, including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division, 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus (like Anne and Margot) or malnutrition over the following weeks. The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.

Source:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust