Holocaust

They helped to liberate the concentration camps.

However when the Jews were being rounded up and slaughtered Americans and canadians remained neutral and refused to fight against the Nazis.

The general concensus for the timeline of the holocaust is that it began following conferences by top German officials in 1942 and ended upon the camps liberation in 1945 by Allies troops.

Gradually the German persecution of Jews built up momentum so that by the time of the Wanasee Conference in spring 1942, the state sanctioning of murder was approved.

The Germans, along with their ardent supporters in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and other countries continued their anti-Jewish work right up until the camps were liberated in Spring 1945. However the holocaust really did not end there. Just because the Germans were defeated in battle did not end the European wide hatred of Jews. In Poland in 1946 there were many tens of thousands of Jews murdered by the Polish Catholics for no other reason than ethnic hatred (possibly the casualties would have been even higher but by then the 'WWII holocaust' had thinned the Jewish ranks severely).

So great was the suffering of the Jews as an ethnic group that pro-Jewish forces in Britain and America began clammoring for a Jewish nation state. With Jews already illegally emigrating to Palestine, this became the natural location for the new nation. Founded 1947, Israel has been in an almost constant state of war with it neighbors, almost all of whom consider the Jews invaders and occupiers. Despite all the efforts of various heads of state this situation will not be resolved soon as the emotions run to too deep on both sides. It will be a millennium or more before this situation is resolved.

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However ...

1. The Holocaust had already begun by the time of the Wannsee Conference. Most historians now date the start of the genocide in 1941.

2. " In Poland in 1946 there were many tens of thousands of Jews murdered by the Polish Catholics for no other reason than ethnic hatred". Well, the highest figure I've seen anywhere is about 600, which is bad enough. A figure of about 330 is more common. As for the reason ... hardline Polish nationalists, like the Nazis, believed that the Jews were Communists. Of course, there may have been ethnic reasons too.

The earliest firm evidence of Hitler's antisemitism dates from 1916, when Hitler was aged 27, so stories about early experiences in his life should be treated with caution.

Hitler believed that the Jews were involved in a great conspiracy to control the wealth of Europe and to dominate and destroy the German or Aryan people. Whether that belief was the basis for his hatred or was a result of it is not something I think can be determined.

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The reasons most commonly given are that Hitler believed that the Jews:

1. Were Communists (and that Communism was a Jewish political philosphy).
2. Had deliberately caused Germany to lose World War 1 by wrecking the home front in Germany itself.
3. Had caused the Great Depression.
4. He believed a bizarre conspiracy that claimed that the Jews were planning to dominate the world.

The first of these views - of the Jews as Communists - was also widespread in many other countries, including Britain and the U.S. However, most people elsewhere seem to have taken this with a pinch of salt and certainly didn't get so worked up about it.

As for the conspiracy theory that the Jews were trying to dominate the world, Yehuda Bauer summarizes it neatly as follows:

"The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology - which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."

Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002, p.48. (Quoted in Wikipedia article on the Holocaust, accessed 31 March 2009).

Obviously, there is something nutty about such notions, but there is no evidence that Hitler was clinically insane.

In the interwar period (1918-1939) it was perfectly acceptable to express racist, ethnic, religious and cultural prejudice loud and clear, both in Europe and the U.S. Most German Jews did not take the Nazis' antisemitism particularly seriously before 1933. Almost none had made any practical arrangements in advance to leave the country, for example.

Hitler's Jew-baiting was not particularly popular outside the beer-halls of Bavaria and a few other places and was not the vote-catcher that the above answer claims.

Please see the related questions.

The Warsaw Ghetto was an excellent example of militant resistance, though rare because of the lack of arms there are other examples. Evasion by heading to the woods or to Sweden or elsewhere was very common and very dangerous, it required outside help to increase the chances of survival. Some managed to ransom there way out, but the Nazis could rarely be trusted.

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One could not buy one's way out.

Mr. van Pels was gassed at Auschwitz. Mrs. van Pels died, probably en route to Theresienstadt

early in 1945. Peter van Pels died at Matthausen in early May, 1945. Edith Frank died of starvation and exhaustion in Auschwitz in early January, 1945. Margot and Ann Frank died of typhus in Belsen in early March, 1945. Mr. Frank survived, and devoted his life to the message of Anne's diary, dying in 1980.

ANSWER: Basically Jewish kids above the age of 6 had to wear the Star of David just like all of the adult Jewish population. On September 1, 1941 Germany passed a law requiring all Jews over the age of 6 to wear a yellow Jewish Star of David on the left side of their chest. This was then repeated in several of the Western European nations under Nazi occupation on April 28, 1942. Again the decree ordering all Jews to wear the Yellow Star also included an exemption for children aged 6 and under. So it appears that, in general, Jewish children were required to wear the Star of David if they were above the age of 6. Therefore, the answer is yes, countless Jewish children were forced to wear the Yellow Star of David except those who were 6 years old or younger.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1941- 'German Jews above the age of six are forced to wear a yellow Star of David sewed on the left side of their clothes with the word "Jude" printed in black.' (Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida)

APRIL 28, 1942- 'In accordance with Paragraph 45 of Order 138/41 of the Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Dutch Territories concerning public security, I order the following:

1) A Jew who appears in public is obliged to wear a Jewish star.

2) For the implementation of this order a Jew is everyone who was defined as a Jew according to order no. 189/40 concerning the registration of enterprises. Children under the age of sixare not included in this order.'

These are quotes from Holocaust survivors; not the people such as Miep Gies and Oskar Schindler who protected the Jews.

• Solomon Radasky "Out of the 78 people in my family, I am the only one to survive. My parents had 3 boys and 3 girls: My parents were Jacob and Toby; my brothers were Moishe and Baruch, and my sisters were Sarah, Rivka and Leah. They were all killed."
• Leslie Meisels "Silence helps the oppressors."
• Solomon Radasky "After a few days some people could not take it anymore, and they fell down in the road. If they could not get up, they were shot where they lay. After work we had to carry the bodies back. If 1,000 went out to work, a 1,000 had to come back."
• Simon Wiesenthal "For me, the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy."
• Sara Atzmon "Love gives us wings to soar above it all."
• Elie Wiesel "No human race is superior, no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them."
• Joszf Paczynski (on why he didn't kill Commandant Hoess, although he had multiple opportunities) "Yes, I could have done it. But I realized very well what the consequences would be. All my family and half of the camp would be killed. And of course I realized if this silent son of a b**** would go, there will be another man who will take his place."
• Simon Wiesenthal "For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing."
• Elie Wiesel "For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile."
• David Faber "This is why I'm pouring my heart out to you. To make this a better world, not the king of world I lived in. Not with hate, all I want from you is to bring up your own children without hat. I beg of you. That is all I want."

See Related Links below.

A death camp (or extermination camp) was a Nazi camp intended and designed for the sole purpose of killing the inmates, usually with special apparatus, such as gas chamber, specially designed for mass murder.

The first death to become operational was Chelmno, where routine mass gassings of Jews started on 8 December 1941.

Chelmno was followed by:

• Auschwitz II (Birkenau)
• Belzec
• Treblinka II
• Sobibor
• Majdanek (one section of the camp)

Note that in some camps the inmates were worked to death on grossly insufficient food. This applies in particular to:

• Auschwitz I and III
• Majdanek (the other section)

These camps are often also called death camps.

The death toll at all the major "ordinary" concentration camps was high. At least two stand out:

• Stutthof (near Danzig, Poland). Like most camps, this was a large complex of camps. The estimated death toll is about 65,000.
• Bergen-Belsen (near Hanover, Germany). In the later stages of the war this was used as a dumping-ground for inmates moved out of Auschwitz and other camps in the east. It became hopelessy overcrowded and insanitary. Estimated death toll: about 50,000 of whom about 75% perished in the typhus epidemic that gripped the camp in early 1945.

These camps are sometimes also referred to as death camps because of the high death toll.