History of the Jews during World War II

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The Holocaust
Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944
Responsibility Nazi Germany People Major perpetrators Adolf Hitler Heinrich Himmler Joseph Goebbels Heinrich Müller Reinhard Heydrich Adolf Eichmann Odilo Globocnik Theodor Eicke Richard Glücks Ernst Kaltenbrunner Rudolf Höss Christian Wirth Organizations Nazi Party Gestapo Schutzstaffel (SS) Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) Einsatzgruppen Sturmabteilung (SA) Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT) Wehrmacht Trawniki men Collaborators during World War II Nazi ideologues
Early policies Racial policy Nazi eugenics Nuremberg Laws Haavara Agreement Madagascar Plan Forced euthanasia
Victims Jews Romani people (Gypsies) Poles Soviet POWs Slavs in Eastern Europe Homosexuals People with disabilities
Ghettos Białystok Budapest Kaunas Kraków Łódź Lublin Lwów Minsk Riga Warsaw Vilnius Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland List of selected ghettos
Camps Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz II-Birkenau Bełżec Chełmno Jasenovac Majdanek Sajmište Sobibor Treblinka Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz I Bergen-Belsen Bogdanovka Buchenwald Dachau Dora Gonars (Italy) Gross-Rosen Herzogenbusch Janowska Kaiserwald Mauthausen-Gusen Neuengamme Rab Ravensbrück Sachsenhausen Salaspils Stutthof Transnistria (Romania) Theresienstadt Uckermark Warsaw Transit and collection camps Belgium Breendonk Mechelen France Gurs Drancy Italy Bolzano Netherlands Amersfoort Westerbork Slovakia Sereď Divisions SS-Totenkopfverbände Concentration Camps Inspectorate Politische Abteilung Sanitätswesen Extermination methods Gas van Gas chamber Extermination through labour Einsatzgruppen Human medical experimentation
Atrocities Pogroms Kristallnacht Bucharest Dorohoi Iași Izieu Szczuczyn Jedwabne Plungė Radziłów pogrom Kaunas Lviv (Lvov) Marseille Tykocin Vel' d'Hiv Wąsosz Einsatzgruppen Babi Yar Bydgoszcz Częstochowa Kamianets-Podilskyi Ninth Fort Odessa Piaśnica Ponary Rumbula Erntefest "Final Solution" Wannsee Conference Mogilev Conference Operation "Reinhard" Holocaust trains Extermination camps End of World War II Wola massacre Death marches
Resistance Auschwitz Protocols Vrba–Wetzler report Czesław Mordowicz Jerzy Tabeau Rudolf Vrba Alfréd Wetzler Bricha Jewish partisans Sonderkommando photographs Witold Pilecki Resistance movement in Auschwitz Związek Organizacji Wojskowej Witold's Report Ghetto uprisings Warsaw Białystok Łachwa Częstochowa
International response Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations Auschwitz bombing debate MS St. Louis Nuremberg trials Denazification
Aftermath Bricha Displaced persons Survivors Central Committee of the Liberated Jews Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany
Lists Holocaust survivors Deportations of French Jews to death camps Survivors of Sobibor Timeline of Treblinka extermination camp Victims of Nazism Rescuers of Jews Memorials and museums
Resources Bibliography List of books about Nazi Germany The Destruction of the European Jews Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Functionalism versus intentionalism
Remembrance Days of remembrance Memorials and museums Righteous Among the Nations
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The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa (pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and Italian Libya). The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews.^[1] During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.^[2]

Leading to World War II, nearly all Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. As the war started, massacres of Jews took place originally as part of Operation Tannenberg against the Polish nation. The much larger and methodical mass killings of Jews began with the onset of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Led by Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police battalions, the destruction of European Jews took place with the active participation of local Auxiliary Police including Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian units.^[2]