On 27 October 1938, Nazi Germany carried out the brutal eviction of Jews with Polish citizenship. SS men drove children, the elderly and the sick across the Polish border; most of them were concentrated in abandoned stables near the border town of Zbąszyń, Poland. The deportation to Zbąszyń was directly connected with the November Pogrom, a violent anti-Jewish attack that took place on 9-10 November 1938.
Operation Reinhard was a codename for the Nazi scheme to exterminate the 2,284,000 Jews living in the five districts of the Generalgouvernement. The scheme was named after Reinhard Heydrich, the main coordinator of the "Final Solution" in Europe, who had been assassinated by Czech resistance fighters. Three extermination camps were established for its implementation: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
In their implementation of the "Final Solution," the Nazis forcibly uprooted millions of Jews from their homes and sent them to their deaths. This systematic campaign marked a tragic and devastating chapter in history, annihilating Jewish communities that had thrived for centuries across areas occupied by Nazi Germany.
On 21 September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police, sent a Schnellbrief in which he outlined the policy regarding Jews in occupied Poland. It was determined that Jews should be transferred from towns and villages to cities where ghettos would be established. Within a year of Poland’s occupation, most of its Jews were imprisoned in enclosed ghettos, usually in the poorest and most rundown neighborhoods.
The Łódź ghetto was established on 30 April 1940. It was the second-largest ghetto in German-occupied territory, and also the most isolated from its surroundings and other ghettos. Approximately 60,000 Jews were incarcerated there, joined later by tens of thousands of Jews from the region and from the Reich, as well as Sinti and Roma.
In 1941, the Germans established a transit camp and ghetto in the town of Theresienstadt (Terezín) in Czechoslovakia. By the time it was liberated on 8 May 1945, over 155,000 Jews had passed through Theresienstadt; approximately 35,000 were murdered in the ghetto, and some 88,000 were deported to the extermination camps.
Kovno, Lithuania, was occupied by the Germans in June 1941. Even before their arrival, the Lithuanians had carried out murderous pogroms against the Jews, which continued in the presence of the Germans. Anti-Jewish decrees were issued, and some 30,000 Jews were ordered to move into a ghetto, which was sealed in August 1941.
Jews from across Europe were deported to the camp. Upon arrival, they underwent a selection process. Most were sent directly to the gas chambers, and a small number were selected for forced labor, either within the main camp or in Auschwitz’s sub-camps. Some prisoners were also subjected to brutal medical experiments.
Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941 with the massive military invasion of the Soviet Union. Four special operations divisions (Einsatzgruppen) – A, B, C and D – operated behind the corps that took part in the campaign against the USSR. The units were made up of SS, police and auxiliaries mobilized from the local population.
The occupation of France and the establishment of the antisemitic Vichy regime brought 415,000 North African Jews into the orbit of persecution.
In a world of total moral collapse there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values, risking their lives to save Jews by hiding them in their homes, providing false papers and assisting their escape: the Righteous Among the Nations.
Jewish organizations attempted to rescue Jews by getting them out of the camps, by ransoming them for money, by placing them in children’s institutions or private homes, and by organizing their emigration.
The partisan movement refers to resistance groups and fighters who opposed occupying forces during World War II. Wide-scale partisan warfare was waged against the Germans in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The vast areas with thick forests and marshland were well-suited for partisan combat.
The family camps were one of the unique phenomena of the partisan movement in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. These units began to emerge in 1942 as a result of the mass extermination of the Jews and the escape of some survivors into the forests. Later, with the expansion of German punitive policies, the phenomenon of family camps ceased to be exclusively Jewish.
Towards the end of the war, as the German army was retreating on all fronts, Nazi Germany began to evacuate the camps near the Eastern Front and march the inmates westward. Not yielding despite their visible defeat, the Nazis were determined to prevent the survivors from falling into Allied hands.
With Nazi Germany’s surrender on 8 May 1945, joy spread worldwide. Yet, for the Jewish people, liberation had come too late. The scale of destruction was staggering — six million Jews, about one-third of world Jewry, had been murdered.
After World War II, an International Military Tribunal put senior Nazis on trial in Nuremberg for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg trials were the first in history where regime, government and military leaders responsible for crimes committed in their countries, were judged.
The Eichmann trial was held in 1961 in Jerusalem. Unlike the Nuremberg trials, which relied extensively on written documents, the Eichmann Trial put survivors at center stage.
During the Holocaust many women faced new and unexpected situations and dilemmas that required them to make fateful decisions. They tried as much as possible to protect their families, secure food, find work and safeguard their children, even when it came at the unbearable cost of separation.