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Holocaust
The genocide of approximately 6 million European Jews during World War II planned by Adolf Hitler.
11,094 Questions
What illnesses did Jews get in concentration camps?
They could have gotten disentary, Typhus, and alot more, but Disentary is the worst. That's like knocking on Death's Door, so to speak. Typhus affects you by the air. That would be the worst, I could immagine.
Who were the helpers in the Holocaust?
There were many heros in the Holocaust.
One of whom being Oscar Schindler who used his munitions building to save the lives of thousands of Jews.
Raoul Wallenburg also used his money to give Jewish people Sweedish passports to get out of Nazi occupied Hungry. He saved many people and he disappered.
There were many other famous and non famous heros during the holocause. Many of whom have been honored with a tree planted in Yad Vashim in Isreal.
How many people died from disease during the holocaust?
There is no approximate answer to that, however, 6 million Jewish people died during the Holocaust because of the Nazi's cruelty.
The French hated the Germans in the late 1800s because the Germans attacked the French during WWI, because before the rise of Hitler, Germany wanted power.
What is symbolism for the holocaust?
Yellow Star of David was worn by all European Jews with some regional variations. This was so Nazi soldiers, SS like the lightning (the s for the band kiss) and Jew haters could identify Jews at a glance. There were also several other symbols worn by inmates in the concentration camps. Pink triangle for homosexuals, brown triangle for gypsies, black triangle for anti social prisoners, red for political enemies, green for habitual criminals, blue for foreigners, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses. If the person was a Jew and one of the above she would wear a yellow triangle with the appropriate color badge on top of it to form a two-color Magen David.
All Jews over the age of ? were forced to wear a white armband with a blue Magen David on it when they were outdoors. Again, so they could be easily identified and presumably harassed.
Nazi Swastika. The swastika has been around for thousands of years but brought into ill repute by Hitler and his minions of evil. The derivation of the word "swastika" is Sanskrit and roughly translates "icon" or "good luck charm." Some form of the swastika can be found in many cultures but it has fallen into disuse because of its association with the evil committed by Hitler and his followers.
What year did the Nazis start capturing Jews?
The first round-up of Jews (simply because they were Jews) was in November 1938 during the Night of Broken Glass. Some Jews were sent to concentration camps before that, but as Communists, socialists or as journalists. (The Nazis had a particular hatred of Jewish journalists).
How did Hitler manipulate the Jews?
Post WWI German economy was in shambles, and the German people felt oppressed by the blame that they were forced to carry for the Second Reich's policy. Hitler found the Jews as the perfect scapegoat: they had access to the country's economy due to the efficiency of most Jews as an ethnicity in banking, and snowballed all the problems of Germany around this issue. Hitler's charisma in speech and his brilliant tactics drained the German people of any resistance they might have had at blaming their troubles on an apparent culprit.
Did Elie Wiesel's sisters Hilda and Bea survive the Holocaust?
In 1947, he began to study French with a tutor. By chance, Wiesel's sister, Hilda, saw his picture in a newspaper and got in touch with him. Months later, Wiesel was also reunited with his sister Bea in Antwerp. I found this at: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Wiesel.html
Did Jews survive gas chambers?
Yes. There is one woman, Gena Turgel who walked out of the gas chamber alive and was not killed when found alive.
However, once one was actually in an extermination camp, the chances of survival were practically nil. Most survivors were people used for slave labor or people who managed to hide successfully till the danger was past. As for the former, it helped if one was sent to a camp late in the Holocaust.
source:
NBC news article: auschwitz survivor gena turgel walked out gas chamber alive
Who created the final solution?
The "final solution" (extermination of all Jews within German-occupied territories) was outlined at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. The conference was called by Reinhard Heydrich at the behest of Reich Marshal Hermann Goring, who was acting on behalf of Adolf Hitler. Heydrich was charged with creating and implementing the deportation, imprisonment, and execution of the Jewish populations. Present at the meeting was Adolf Eichmann, who took over Operation Reinhard after Heydrich was assassinated in Prague on June 4.
Could the Germans have done anything to prevent the holocaust?
Opinion
Obviously, it would have helped if the U.S., Britain, Australia and Canada had taken in more refugees from Germany in the 1930s, before the Holocaust began. For an example of this aspect of Holocaust history you can read about the tragedy of the S.S. St. Louis at the related link.
However, the Holocaust could not have been prevented by the United States or any other country (except Germany).
Opinion
It is said that the US and the UK could have tried to bomb rail lines leading to the camps, but it is worth considering a worst case scenario, such as a large air raid that failed to destroy the gas chambers or crematoria but that killed thousands of inmates. It seems that the matter was discussed briefly at the time and that the idea was dismissed.
Opinion
Those with a basic knowledge of air-to-ground warfare in the WWII era will see the impossibility of preventing the Holocaust by bombing the rail lines. Railroad track can be repaired quickly and easily, and even a knocked out train bridge could be repaired by the Gemans in amazing time. The gas chambers were developed at the behest of Heinrich Himmler who after witnessing a mass execution by machine gun demanded something more efficient. Also, few people realize that the first mid-air refueling was done in 1929. The aircraft, named the Question Mark, set a world record for remaining in the air for 150 hours. Only after the war when Communism became the new enemy was it decided that bombers needed an inflight refeuling capability. Bombing surely could have saved some Holocaust victims, but it also would have killed some in the process. Only an invasion of Germany, delayed until 1945 by the squabbling Allies, could have stopped the Holocaust.
Opinion
The British government received frequent reports about the Holocaust from the Polish Home Army and other organizations in Poland from late 1941 onwards. When the first report about regular mass gassings reached London a Foreign Office official who read it wrote in the margin 'Bolshevist propaganda?' (The document is in the Public Record Office). The U.S. government was also kept informed. Neither government wanted to know. Unfortunately, some of the earliest reports were vague and seemed (or actually were) exaggerated, which did not enhance their credibilty.
Some information obtained was released to the public, and in Britain in late 1942 and early 1943 and there was some discussion in the media about what might be done, and a small campaign to 'do something' got under way. However, it seems that the government saw the issue as a distraction from the war effort and manipulated public discussion in other directions.
There was not that much that the Allies could have done. They could have denounced the Holocaust 'loud and clear' and given it much more publicity. They might have tried to bomb the rail network near the major camps and they could have asked local resistance groups to give a high priority to disrupting the Holocaust. The extermination camps were nearly all in Poland, which was a long way from Allied bomber bases and deep inside German-held territory. A physical rescue by Special Operations would not have been possible. (One needs to have some knowledge of European geography when discussing these matters).
Opinion
Precision bombing of gas chambers and crematoria was not practical. Moreover, the exact location of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was not known to the Allies till the summer of 1944, following the escape (from Auschwitz) of Vrba and Wetzler who wrote a detailed, high quality report on the camp. It was forwarded to the Allies, who believed its contents and issued a thunderous denunciation ... In the U.S. this report together with another, earlier report was published in English in the U.S. in November 1944.
There are the now famous reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz I and II (and part of III) which seem to have conveyed nothing at the time to those who analyzed it. (See link)
The Soviet air force was much closer and might have been better placed to bomb that railways near the death camps. As has been pointed out above, precision bombing was difficult as the time. One needs also to consider a worst-case scenario of inaccuate bombing, such as an air raid that killed most of the prisoners but left the gas chambers and crematoria largely undamaged.
Opinion
A Polish courier, Jan Karski, even had two face-to-face meetings with President Roosevelt about conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto and also told him about a feeder camp for Belzec (which he mistook for Belzec itself). When Karski pleaded for immediate intervention, President Roosevelt told him, 'Tell them that the guilty will be punished'.
Opinion
There was no indication prior to WW2 that the Nazis were planning on exterminating the Jews. Persecuting them, certainly, but European countries have a long history of persecuting the Jews (and, to be fair, the US was no innocent here either). The decision to initiate the Holocaust appears to have been an opportunistic one made by Hitler after WW2 began - it's unlikely that had the war NOT started, he would have refrained from beginning a Jewish pogrom at some point, but the systematic killing of Jews started as a side-"benefit" of the German conquests in 1939-41 (from Hitler's point of view).
Also, the idea that an earlier US entry would have stopped Hitler from initiating the Holocaust has no basis in reality. Remember that the Holocaust was conducted even when it conflicted with military necessity - that is, Hitler redirected critically-needed materials and manpower from the military to complete the Holocaust. There's no indication whatsoever that fighting yet another opponent would have halted the Holocaust once it began, as carrying it out became an obsession for Hitler and the SS once it had begun, and no other organization or person inside Germany could have countered this force. And, an early US entrance to the war would NOT have stopped the Holocaust from beginning - the Holocaust was started as a consequence of the military victories of 1939-41. Even if the US entrance had forced Nazi Germany from turning on the USSR in 1941, Germany still controlled the vast majority of territory that held Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.
Opinion
There's no rational scenario where the United States (or, frankly, any other country) could have halted or prevented the Holocaust from starting, since the decision to start was not a rational one to begin with, and the conditions which led to the decision to start were not really preventable - i.e. as soon as Germany finished the early conquests of 1939-40, the conditions to start the Holocaust were met, and there's no real rational basis for assuming that the Germans wouldn't have won the victories they did in 1939-40.
Opinion
To answer the question: there are no rational, let alone realistic, ways that the United States could have preventedthe Holocaust. The single possible route for this would have been to prevent the rise of Hitler in the first place, and that's a task which would have required near omniscience on the part of anyone in the 1920s.
Now, there are a great deal of things that the US could have done to reduce the total body count of the Holocaust, but that's an entirely different issue.
What would have happened if the U.S. did not go to world war 2?
America would probley not be affected that much, Germany would have taken most of Europe, but it would have taken a couple of years to take Russia completely, even if the Germans had won, they would have to spend millions, if not billions to rebuild and recover from so many losses, their empire would collapse and the resistance of the ussr, Britain, and France would prove too much for the Germans to handle, they would pull back to Germany and the long war would end in a stalemate.
We would most likely be taken over by Nazis!
Great comment #1. Absolute hit. Dear Jaded, please be informed that by June '44 Russia had recaptured most of the territory occupied by the Nazies and was building up its military potential rapidly. Less that 1 year later, Berlin was taken by the Soviet troops (ever seen this picture:http://English.pravda.ru/main/18/87/347/9934_victory.HTML). A 'D-Day' was no more important than a mosquito's bite in elefant's skin, pardon the allegory. The Red Army could have occupied the whole of Europe by, say, Autumn '45. I'm not saying this would have been good, but this was definitely possible.
The USSR could have easily beat the Axis powere on their on. We would have seen the USSR invade Europe from the East, and the British and its Empire would land in Sicily on their own, only later on, perhaps 1945-1946. The USSR would have been free to dominate Europe, with Britain and France over-shadowed. Britain beat the Japenese in Burma hands down in 1944-45, but I expect the USSR,as it did in real life, would have declared war on Japan and taken the place of the USA in laying down Japans post-war sanctions. Instead of a Nazi dominated Eurasia, we would be living in a Soviet dominated Eurasia, and probably Africa by the sixties-seventies, too. The USA would be in the second place that the USSR held in real life in the cold war.
Firstly remember this ...Japan would have attacked the USA regardless of the state of play in Europe in 1941. And the USA would have responded,and Gemany and Italy would have declared war on the USA in support of Japan ( Treaties)War for the USA was unavoidable. Secondly to those amongst you who belive that the USSR would have still beaten Nazi Germany, if the USA had not entered consider this.. The UK was, in late 1941, still very much in the war. It had stood firm against the threat of invasion (again), its commonwealth allies where fighting with her in Africa, the Middle east and Greece,and it was buliding its strength. Hitlers biggest single mistake throughout WWII was to turn on the USSR while leaving a Trouble-some and increasingly belligerent Britain behind him, He(Hitler) could not ignore the UK, and significant forces had to be commited to keep the pressure on the island nation. Had Germany been able to crush the UK in 1940, then Hitler would quite easily have found himself reviewing his troops in Red Square, instead he was thrown back when only 100miles short of the Russian capital. There are many Nations today who owe their continuance to a 26 mile wide stretch of water called THE ENGLISH CHANNEL.
probably the usa would under pressure to race for the atomic weapons. since we were the firt to bomb hiroshima and nagasaki. well Germany probably would have gained atomic weapons. we wouldn't because we have no reason to since we never entered ww2
Germany would of took control of every country in Europe. British troops would of been smashed with no mercy, absolute power over Europe would be in Adolf Hitler's hands. USSR is another question that should be asked, with it's great numbers of troops, tanks, rockets etc. Germany and the USSR would of fought for decades.
it probably wouldn't have affected America that much actually. They may have remained isolanist instead of getting very involved in other countrieS like they have since WWII and countinue to do today. However it would've affected the rest of the world although i agree with people the Nazis would've eventually been defeated by the Soviets even without American help but it would've taken much longer. It also depends if America aided the allies or completely stayed neutral, if America was totally neutral then Germany may just have conquered all of Europe and most of the rest of the world, if they didn't fight but gave aid to Britain and the soviets than the Nazis probly eventually woulda been defeated by say 1950 at the latest. The soviets probly woulda taken over all of Europe and made an agreement with England after defeating Germany meaning the Soviets likely woulda controlled all of Europe leaving England very vunerable as the only non communist country in Europe. The US and England probly eventually woulda launched an operation similar to D-Day to try to free Europe from the Soviets later on
I believe that without the united states industrial contributions russia would have not been able to defeat the Germans on there own. Americas lend lease policy helped russias troops have the best air and land equipment available surprising the Germans and boosting the red armys morale tremendously.
What happened to the personal items of Holocaust victims?
Really good question. As you must already know, the Jews were encouraged by the gestapo to bring their valuables with them when being arrested, supposedly to have to buy food and of course they were searched and all their jewelry etc. were confiscated immediately distribution of this (after
the SS guards took their fill for personnel gain) was melted down and put in Swiss gold accounts by the Nazis. Evita Peron got her hands of some of it on her famous trip to Europe, which was a payoff for Argentina's willingness to take in wanted Nazis after the war. There are still to this day questionable Swiss bank accounts. The financial gain at the expense of the Jews was enormous.
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What was life like in a Jewish ghetto?
Life was terrible. you were under Nazi rule. The Jews in the ghettos were completely dependent on the Nazis and the Judenrat (Jewish council) for food, water and medication. so many people died of starvation, thirst, and disease. It was always overcrowded. Fear of being murdered or deported was constant. Everyday more and more Jews were sent to death camps.
Were there Jews in the NAZI party?
Could be, Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Rosenberg office (Amt Rosenberg) was at least a racial Jew.
What did victor frankl do in the concentration camps?
By profession, Frankl was a psychiatrist. Among other things, he gave what one would now call counselling to some newly arrived prisoners who were having particular difficulty coping with the psychological effects of having to adjust to a new, demeaning and painful way of life.
How many Jews were gassed in the Holocaust?
The generally accepted estimate of the total number of Jewish dead in the Holocaust is about six million.
The number of Jews killed in extermination camps and other concentration camps by the Nazis is widely estimated at about 3.8-4.0 million, of whom the majority were gassed. In addition about 200,000 gypsies were killed. A further 1.1 million Jews were murdered in open air shootings and about 800,000 perished from "general deprivation" - for example, in ghettos.
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Many non-Jews were also killed by the Nazis including those deemed "defective" (deaf, blind, mentally retarded, crippled, homosexuals) as well as gypsies (the Roma people), Jehovah's Witnesses' and the many local peoples who starved to death across Europe during the war and those who were killed by stray bullets, bombs, collapsing buildings, disease, lack of clean food/water, etc.
Who were the individuals most responsible for the Holocaust?
The Allied armies, coming from both the East (Russians) and the West (British Canadians Poles Americans) forced the Germans to stop fighting and surrender their armies.
The camps were discovered, and the inmates were liberated. Most of them were too sick to go anywhere for a few months. They needed to be fed and given medical treatment. Many died despite the best efforts of the Allies, due to their advanced state of starvation.
What was the main reason Jews hated Hitler?
There is a good possibilty that Jewish animus towards Hitler derives from the latter's desire to annihilate the former. (I.e. Jew hate Hitler because Hitler wanted to kill all of the Jews.)
What qualities to participate on Danish resistance would you need?
Be able to function without sleep, food, or water for LONG LONG periods of time.
How many Jews were killed in Germany between 1933 and 1939?
The answer to that question depends on definition. If the number is based on actual NSDAP membership numbers then it is approx 1,00,000. However many German cizitens believed in ideology of Nazism but were not NSDASP members. This would make almost impossible to estimate the exact numbers of Nazis
What countries fought against each other in World War 1?
the major countries that were fought in the war were Germany,Austria-Hungary,and Italy
I looked up a list and here's what I got.
Belgium (including Belgian colonial forces)
British Empire
Australia
British crown colonies
Canada
India
New Zealand
Newfoundland
South Africa
United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland
France (including French colonial forces)
Kingdom of Greece (May 1917 and after)
Kingdom of Italy (April 1915 and after)
Empire of Japan
Kingdom of Montenegro
Portugal (March 1916 and after) (including Portuguese colonial forces)
Kingdom of Romania (August 1916-May 1918)
Russian Empire (until November 1917)
Kingdom of Serbia
United States of America (April 1917 and after)
Albania
Andorra
Armenia (May 1918 and after)
Bolivia (April 1917 and after)
Brazil (October 1917 and after)
China (August 1917 and after)
Costa Rica (May 1918 and after)
Cuba (April 1917 and after)
Czechoslovakia
Ecuador (December 1917 and after)
Guatemala (April 1918 and after)
Liberia (August 1917 and after)
Haiti (July 1918 and after)
Honduras (July 1918 and after)
Nicaragua (May 1918 and after)
Panama (December 1917 and after)
Peru (October 1917 and after)
San Marino (June 1915 and after)
Siam (July 1917 and after)
Uruguay (October 1917 and after)
How were Jews treated unfairly?
Jewish people in the Second World War were forced to endure many different kinds of discrimination because of their religion. They had to sew a yellow cutout of the Star of David to their clothes to publicize that they were Jewish. Many restaurants and shops were closed to Jewish people. Jewish shop owners were forced to close their shops with no compensation. They were forced to give up their homes and all possessions to move into unsanitary and cramped "ghettos". These ghettos were eventually liquidated and the Jewish people were moved to work camps where they were separated from their family members. In these camps they were under-fed and sometimes not fed at all. Many people died from starvation and from the cold. An unknown number of Jews (the actual number is only an estimate as records were not kept, and when they were, they were often destroyed) were led to "showers" but were in fact killed by a poisonous gas emitted from the sprinklers. Millions of Jewish people died in the Second World War, innocent people of all ages.
Did the Jews deserve to die during the holocaust?
In the early stages of the Holocaust the corpses were buried in mass graves, but later they were cremated.
