Similarly, an overwhelming majority of agnostics (87%), Jews (86%) and atheists (84%) know that ghettos were parts of a town or city where Jews were forced to live. [119], France had approximately 330,000 Jews, divided between the German-occupied north and the unoccupied collaborationist southern areas in Vichy France (named after the town Vichy), more than half this Jewish population were not French citizens, but refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in other countries. (April 20, 2020 / JNS) Eighty-one years after the Holocaust, the global Jewish population is still short of the 16.6 million estimated to have been alive on the eve of the war in 1939, with Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics reporting ahead of Yom Hashoah that there were 14.7 million Jews worldwide at the end of 2018. All of these countries were under no formal German occupation and maintained complete domestic administrations. [9], The first recorded use of the term holocaust in its modern sense was made in 1895 by The New York Times to describe the massacre of Armenian Christians by Ottoman forces. [150] The latter was known as Sardinenpackung ("packing sardines"), a method reportedly started by SS officer Friedrich Jeckeln. , Responses to this question were coded to prioritize knowledge of the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. [115] On 26 November 1942, 532 Jews were taken by police officers, at four o'clock in the morning, to Oslo harbor, where they boarded a German ship. By March 1941 all Jews had lost their jobs and had their property confiscated. Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII's Deadliest - History Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, or 4.1million. [293] Timothy Snyder noted that it was only during the three months after the deportations of JulySeptember 1942 that agreement on the need for armed resistance was reached.[294]. | DW | 30 July 2017", "Poster promoting the Nazi monthly publication, "Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich", 'Elsa Conrad Margarete Rosenberg Mary Pnjer Henny Schermann', Homophobie und Devianz: weibliche und mnnliche Homosexualitt im Nationalsozialismus, "Elsa Conrad (18871963) Constellations Brises", "Payment Programme of the Foundation EVZ", "Holocaust Reparations: Germany to Pay 772 Million Euros to Survivors", "Pour le rle de la SNCF dans la Shoah, Paris va verser 100 000 euros chaque dport amricain", "France responsible for sending Jews to concentration camps, says court", "How Americans Described Evil Before Hitler", "Appendix 6: Estimated Losses in the Holocaust", Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 19331949, "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews", "Not a slippery slope or sudden subversion: German medicine and National Socialism in 1933", "Bibliographic Classification of Documents Dealing with the Subject 'Holocaust', "Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, JuneDecember 1941", Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, Persecution of Jews during the Black Death, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project (BAHOHP), Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), National Socialist German Doctors' League, National Socialist League for Physical Exercise (NSRL), Bulgarian National Socialist Workers Party, German National Socialist Workers' Party (Czechoslovakia), Finnish National Socialist Labor Organisation, German National Movement in Liechtenstein, National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands, National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark, Nationalist Liberation Alliance (Argentina), South African Gentile National Socialist Movement, Interminority racism in the United States, Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire, Decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent, Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent, Persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction, Persecution of Christians in the Eastern Bloc, Canadian Indian residential school system, Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, Violence against Hindus in independent India, Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, Attacks by Islamic extremists in Bangladesh, Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Holocaust&oldid=1152441904, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from July 2020, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia extended-confirmed-protected pages, Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2023, Articles lacking reliable references from April 2023, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from August 2022, Pages using Sister project links with hidden wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Deaths caused by the result of direct, intentional actions of violence, Deaths due to famine and disease in the occupied regions, This page was last edited on 30 April 2023, at 07:36. This time, we also included a few questions aimed at measuring how much Americans know about the Holocaust, resulting in this report. And close to two-thirds know that Nazi-created ghettos were parts of a city or town where Jews were forced to live. [39], After World War I (19141918), many Germans did not accept that their country had been defeated. According to Haaretz, the writer Yehuda Erez may have been the first to describe events in Germany as the shoah. "[199] Romania set up concentration camps in Transnistria, reportedly extremely brutal, where 154,000170,000 Jews were deported from 1941 to 1943. Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, sfn error: no target: CITEREFGordon1984 (, Piotrowski, Tadeusz. [270] At least 1.4million of these were in the General Government area of Poland. [390] Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed, as were 5,000 children and 1,000 Jews, also in institutions. In 1993, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) published the results of a study regarding what U.S. adults and students in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades knew about the Holocaust.4 And in 2018, the Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study, conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, asked American adults many of the same questions that were discussed in the 1993 report. Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World, claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests, recent Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17, Holocaust deniers and public misinformation, School District Mission Statements Highlight a Partisan Divide Over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in K-12 Education, Black and White Americans are far apart in their views of reparations for slavery, Black Americans differ from other U.S. adults over whether individual or structural racism is a bigger problem, How Americans view policy proposals on transgender and gender identity issues, and where such policies exist, Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism but Little Hope It Will Happen, What the data says about Americans views of climate change, Podcasts as a Source of News and Information, AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think, Americans confident in Zelenskyy, but have limited familiarity with some other world leaders, How Public Polling Has Changed in the 21st Century, For more information, see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. All 11,000 Jews from the annexed territories were sent to be murdered, and plans were made to deport 6,0008,000 Bulgarian Jews from Sofia to meet the quota. [125] Several Polish, French and British leaders had discussed the idea in the 1930s, as did German leaders from 1938. "[224][t] On 18 December 1941, Hitler and Himmler held a meeting to which Himmler referred in his appointment book as "Juden frage | als Partisanen auszurotten" ("Jewish question / to be exterminated as partisans"). How Holocaust Denial Works | Snopes.com [145], Between early fall 1941 and late spring 1942, Jrgen Matthus writes, 2million of the 3.5million Soviet POWs captured by the Wehrmacht had been executed or had died of neglect and abuse. [77] Contrary to Goebbel's statements in his diary, the police were not withdrawn; the regular police, Gestapo, SS and SA all took part, although Heinrich Himmler was angry that the SS had joined in. From Germany they were sent by freight train to Auschwitz. 15 Unseen Images from the Holocaust Era That Will Leave You in - Medium Those were not empty words. [205] In Budapest in October and November 1944, the Hungarian Arrow Cross forced 50,000 Jews to march to the Austrian border as part of a deal with Germany to supply forced labor. On average, teens correctly answer slightly fewer questions than U.S. adults do (1.8 vs. 2.2, on average). The movement embraced a pseudo-scientific racism that viewed Jews as a race whose members were locked in mortal combat with the Aryan race for world domination. Note (1)"Other" includes, for example, persons killed in shooting operations in Poland in 19391940; as partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, France or Belgium; in labor battalions in Hungary; during antisemitic actions in Germany and Austria before the war; by the Iron Guard in Romania, 19401941; and on evacuation marches from concentration camps and labor camps in the last six months of World War II. Scholars defend Polish Holocaust researcher targeted by govt ", "Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945", "Shoah: How a Biblical Term Became the Hebrew Word for Holocaust", "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", "Senior Management Team: Dr. Michael Gray, Academic and Universities Director", "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution", "Antisemitic Austrian election poster by Bernd Steiner", "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto", "Jewish Losses during the Holocaust: By Country", "Einsatzgruppe member kills a Jewish woman and her child near Ivangorod, Ukraine, 1942". Inflaming the anti-Jewish sentiment was the apparent over-representation of Jews in the leadership of communist revolutionary governments in Europe, such as Ernst Toller, head of a short-lived revolutionary government in Bavaria. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms from the summer of 1941. In addition to the 32 questions about religious topics, the survey included five factual questions to test knowledge of the Holocaust: one open-ended question and four multiple-choice questions. [151], The German army took part in these shootings as bystanders, photographers, and active shooters. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. While no precise numbers are likely to ever be determined, after 70 years of research and increasingly open archives, these ranges are likely not to change dramatically in the years ahead. Holocaust, Hebrew Shoah ("Catastrophe"), Yiddish and Hebrew urban ("Destruction"), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Holocaust Memorial Museum. By the end of the war, some 10,000 remained, representing the lowest survival rate in the Balkans and among the lowest in Europe. From mid-1942, as part of Sonderaktion 1005, prisoners at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Beec, Sobibr, and Treblinka were forced to exhume and burn bodies that had been buried, in part to hide the evidence, and in part because of the terrible smell pervading the camps and a fear that the drinking water would become polluted. In addition, Americans ages 65 and older correctly answer an average of 2.5 questions about the Holocaust, compared with 2.2 right answers among those under the age of 65. Seven-in-ten know that the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. [217] According to Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Hitler had trusted American Jews, whom he assumed were all-powerful, to keep the United States out of the war in the interests of German Jews. View the list of all donors. Most Austrians don't know 6 million Jews were killed in Holocaust For example, non-Jews who correctly answer at least three of the four multiple-choice questions about the Holocaust rate Jews at a relatively warm 67 degrees on the feeling thermometer, on average. Washington, DC 20024-2126 Nearly nine-in-ten U.S. Jews (90%), agnostics (90%) and atheists (87%) know that the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. There were also dedicated killing centers, where the deaths were estimated at 20,000, according to Georg Renno, deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers, or 400,000, according to Frank Zeireis, commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Instead, it was a question of "a process of increasingly radical interpretations of orders". There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II. [209] Officers from RSHA IV B4, a Gestapo unit, began deporting Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. [375][376] An estimated 1.81.9million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed by Germans during the war. [174], At the height of the Holocaust from 1941 to 1943, the Jewish population of the SS concentration camps was low. The European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era (19331945),[8] in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of others, including ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, the Roma, the disabled, political and religious dissidents, and gay men. [227] The meeting had been scheduled for 9 December 1941, and invitations had been sent between 29 November and 1 December,[228] but on 8 December it had been postponed indefinitely, probably because of Pearl Harbor. The Holocaust of the French Jews - A Historical Review - Yad Vashem Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. Most Americans know what Holocaust was; don't know 6 million Jews were [230], The 15 men present at Wannsee included Heydrich, SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, head of Reich Security Head Office Referat IV B4 ("Jewish affairs"); SS Major General Heinrich Mller, head of RSHA Department IV (the Gestapo); and other SS and party leaders. [402] In Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the Roma were subject to restrictions on movement and confinement to collection camps,[403] while in Eastern Europe they were sent to concentration camps, where large numbers were murdered. It broke down during the last year and a half of the war. [326], By 1943 it was evident to the leadership of the armed forces that Germany was losing the war. [207] Most Italian Jews, over 40,000, survived the Holocaust. [173] Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates. In a memorandum ten days after the invasion, "U odbilo idom! To accurately estimate the extent of human losses, scholars, Jewish organizations, and governmental agencies since the 1940s have relied on a variety of different records, such as census reports, captured German and Axis archives, and postwar investigations, to compile these statistics. [51] The camps served as a deterrent by terrorizing Germans who did not support the regime. Drive the female Jews into the swamps. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. Sunday, April 30th 2023, 9:45 PM EDT. [92] German plans for Poland included expelling non-Jewish Poles from large areas, settling Germans on the emptied lands,[93] sending the Polish leadership to camps, denying the lower classes an education, and confining Jews. [386] Estimates for the number of involuntary sterilizations during the whole of the Third Reich range from 300,000 to 400,000. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. [324] The Polish government-in-exile's response to the Holocaust has polarized historiography, with some historians arguing that it did more than any other Allied government and others criticizing perceived indifference to the Jewish plight. Nearly nine-in-ten Jews know that about 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, compared with two-thirds of agnostics (64%) and atheists (63%) who get this question right. Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Netherlands and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations. What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Yad Vashem. [215] According to Stone, "the Holocaust in Slovakia was far more than a German project, even if it was carried out in the context of a 'puppet' state. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. [72][i] When vom Rath died on 9 November, the synagogue and Jewish shops in Dessau were attacked. The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique event was influential in early Holocaust scholarship, but came under contestation,[432] and eventually mainstream Holocaust scholarship came to reject explicit claims of uniqueness, while recognizing differences between the Holocaust and other genocides. There are several important differences between Pew Research Centers 2019 Holocaust knowledge questions and the other two surveys that make it so that they are not directly comparable (and thus unable to gauge whether levels of knowledge about the Holocaust have changed over time). Laqueur, Walter; Baumel, Judith Tydor (2001). [409], Lesbians were left relatively unaffected; the Nazis saw them as "asocials", rather than sexual deviants. How German Jews rebuilt after the Holocaust - DW - 02/21/2021 One possible reason that men correctly answer more religious knowledge questions than women do is that. [e] The biblical term shoah (Hebrew: ), meaning "calamity" (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews. A 100-year-old Holocaust survivor, who lived through 12 Nazi concentration camps during World War II, will share his story at the Chabad of Poway. After the United States entry into the war, it was banned from sending relief into German-occupied Europe, but continued to do so. [113] By June 1940 Norway was completely occupied. When the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from the UK and France, Germany gained control of about two million Jews in the territory it occupied. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. [200] In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews. NY rabbi: 'Not even 1 million' Jews killed in Holocaust The Indiana Historical Society museum in Indianapolis is bringing awareness and remembrance towards the recent revival of Jewish hatred with their new exhibit, " Eva Kor from Auschwitz to Indiana .". [355] At least 1.5 million Jews were shot or killed by gas vans, primarily in the Soviet Union. Between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Nazi Germany and its accomplices strove to murder every Jew under their domination. One-Third of Americans Don't Believe 6 Million Jews Were Murdered In response, two-thirds say the Holocaust refers to the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people, or words to that effect, mentioning the mass murder of Jews. [322], During the Holocaust, some Jews in occupied Europe were able to listen to Allied radio broadcasts to learn more about the war situation. [169], During the war, around 15 million people were imprisoned at more than 40,000 distinct detention sites established by the Nazi authorities; about forty percent survived. 2 Between 1939 and 1941, Jews were systematically deprived of their property and their ability to work. TTY: 202.488.0406, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Jewish Losses during the Holocaust: By Country, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center, around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figure for Jews), around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers), around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites), Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina), People with disabilities living in institutions, Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials, German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory, hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above), Auschwitz complex (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps), Shooting operations at various locations in central and southern German-occupied Poland (the Government General), Shooting operations in German-annexed western Poland (District Wartheland), Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps, Shooting operations and gas wagons at hundreds of locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union, Shooting operations in the Soviet Union (German, Austrian, Czech Jews deported to the Soviet Union), Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia, Shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaa regime. The best known is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, when the Germans arrived to send the remaining inhabitants to extermination camps. [196] The Romanian military murdered up to 25,000 Jews during the Odessa massacre between 18 October 1941 and March 1942, assisted by gendarmes and the police. Consequently, the Danish government stayed in power and the Germans found it easier to work through it. These countries were not necessarily signatories of the Tripartite Pact (Finland) and signatories of the Tripartite Pact were not necessarily allies of Germany (Slovakia and Croatia were puppet states). Once the invasion was underway, however, about 100,000 Jews fled Kyiv or were conscripted into the Red Army. [338][339] In January 1945, the Germans held records of 714,000 inmates in concentration camps; by May, 250,000 (35 percent) had died during these marches. [405] Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog"), a directive issued by Hitler on 7 December 1941, resulted in the disappearance, torture and death of political activists throughout German-occupied Europe; the courts had sentenced 1,793 people to death by April 1944, according to Jack Fischel. Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution Often, these ghettos existed only for a short period of weeks or days, and they primarily served to gather Jews in preparation of genocide. U.S. Jews are more likely than atheists and agnostics to know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. ", sfn error: no target: CITEREFStrous2007 (, harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBauer1998 (, List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler, antisemitism and the Holocaust, Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany, Persecution of the Jews in Schleswig-Holstein (19331945), Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Jewish refugees from German-occupied Europe in the United Kingdom, the pogroms were carried out by organized Lithuanian paramilitaries, The Fhrer to the German People: 22 June 1941, Collaboration in German-occupied Soviet Union, Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, Germany declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler's Declaration of War against the United States, Responsibility for the Holocaust Other states, Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe, German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany, Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany, Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, rehabilitation of 500,000 Jewish survivors, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation, "FAQ: How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust? According to Yitzhak Arad, this was the highest number of SS officers killed in a single revolt. Israelis were divided about the idea of taking money from Germany. Europe's Jewish population | Pew Research Center [96][k] From 1 December, Jews were required to wear Star of David armbands. It also includes people caught in hiding and killed in Poland, Serbia, and elsewhere in German-occupied Europe. When America declared war, he blamed the Jews.[218]. Last year, Pew Research Center conducted its second U.S. religious knowledge survey, designed to gauge Americans familiarity with a variety of religion-related facts. [379], The economic strain of the Great Depression led Protestant charities and some members of the German medical establishment to advocate compulsory sterilization of the "incurable" mentally and physically disabled,[381] people the Nazis called Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life). Charts & Statistics - The Concentration Camps - City University of [404], German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the first to be sent to concentration camps. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and they wanted to create a racially pure state. Most U.S. adults know what the Holocaust was and approximately when it happened, but fewer than half can correctly answer multiple-choice questions about the number of Jews who were murdered or the way Adolf Hitler came to power, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. [132][133][134], In the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the Nazi regime demanded that its rulers, the Ustae, adopt antisemitic racial policies, persecute Jews and set up several concentration camps. [9], Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. the Ustashe of Croatia), or forced others into participation. [340] Already sick after exposure to violence and starvation, they were marched to train stations and transported for days without food or shelter in open freight cars, then forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. [351] The British 11th Armoured Division found around 60,000 prisoners (90 percent Jews) when they liberated Bergen-Belsen,[347][352] as well as 13,000 unburied corpses; another 10,000 people died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.