http://www.history.co.

uk/study-topics/history-of-ww2/genocide

The systematic policy of racial extermination carried out against Jews by the Nazis in
Europe duringWorld War II stands out as one of historys most horrifying events. This
assault upon Europes Jewry began when Hitler came to power in 1933 and culminated
in the terrible orchestration of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe, in
which six million Jews were killed.

The Nazis targeted many groups for extermination, including Gypsies, Slavs, the
disabled and homosexuals, all of whom were labelled as undesirables with no future in
the Nazi state. However the scale of persecution and murder of Jews presented in
Nazi ideology as an insidious, lethal enemy of the Aryan master race was on a scale
without comparison. The Nazis drew on a deeply ingrained tradition of anti-Semitism
which permeated much of Europe in the 1930s. And although the Nazis adapted their
rhetoric to meet the times, those who collaborated in the extermination of Jews across
Europe were often responding to much older prejudices.

From 1933 onwards, the Nazis implemented discriminatory policies against German
Jews, most infamously under the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, which stripped them of
German citizenship. In November 1938, Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) an
attack on Jewish property engineered by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels
resulted in the murder of 91 Jews, and the deportation to camps of more than 20,000.

After Germany conquered Poland in 1939, the persecution reached terrifying new
levels. Polish Jews were rounded up and forced to live in ghettoes, where disease and
starvation were constant threats. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,

the Einsatzgruppen (special operations groups) followed in the wake of advancing

German forces. These paramilitary death squads under SS command were made up of
Nazi security forces and local volunteers. They orchestrated mass killings of
defenceless civilians: Communists, intellectuals, gypsies, and above all Jews. At the
ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev,Einsatzgruppe C organised the wars most notorious
massacre, killing 33,771 Jews on 29 and 30 September 1941.

The implementation of Death Camp Operations began in December 1941, at Semlin in

Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where a total of over 400,000 Jews were killed by the
exhaust fumes of specially adapted vans. On 20 January 1942, at a conference in the
Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the Final Solution the annihilation of European Jews - was
set up as a systematic operation headed by Reinhard Heydrich. The Nazis began
transporting Jews to a network of concentration and extermination camps including
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the largest and most notorious, Auschwitz II-Birkenau,
where Jews would be either instantly killed or worked to death. A total of 1.1 million
people (a million of them Jews) were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The horrific scenes of decaying corpses and emaciated prisoners which Allied troops
found as they liberated Nazi camps led to difficult questions about Allied wartime policy
towards Nazi genocide. Many felt that British and US politicians, aware of what was
occurring in Nazi German concentration camps in German-occupied Poland, failed to
act decisively for motives of political expediency.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the leading officials who manned the camps
were tried and executed, including Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, hanged in

1947. In addition, the term genocide became part of international law, due to the 1948
UN Convention on Genocide. Yet as events in Yugoslavia and Rwanda have
demonstrated, these steps failed to extinguish the tragic shadow of genocide from the
world.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005687

JEWISH POPULATION OF EUROPE IN 1945

Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Jewish communities across Europe were
shattered. Many of those who survived were determined to leave Europe and
start new lives in Israel or the United States. The population shifts brought on by
the Holocaust and by Jewish emigration were astounding.
According to the American Jewish Yearbook, the Jewish population of Europe was
about 9.5 million in 1933. In 1950, the Jewish population of Europe was about 3.5
million. In 1933, 60 percent of all Jews lived in Europe. In 1950, most Jews (51
percent) lived in the Americas (North and South combined), while only a third of
the world's Jewish population lived in Europe.
The Jewish communities of eastern Europe were devastated. In 1933, Poland had
the largest Jewish population in Europe, numbering over three million. By 1950,
the Jewish population of Poland was reduced to about 45,000. The Soviet Union
had the largest remaining Jewish population, with some two million Jews.
Romania's Jewish population was nearly 757,000 in 1930 and fell to
approximately 280,000 (1950). Most of these demographic losses were due to the
Holocaust, the rest to postwar emigration from Europe.
The Jewish population of central Europe was also devastated. Germany had a
Jewish population of 565,000 in 1933 and just 37,000 in 1950. Hungary had

445,000 in 1933 and 190,000 in 1950. Czechoslovakia's Jewish population was

reduced from about 357,000 in 1933 to 17,000 in 1950 and Austria's from about
250,000 to just 18,000.
In western Europe, the largest Jewish communities remained in Great Britain,
with approximately 450,000 Jews (300,000 in 1933) and France, with 235,000
(225,000 in 1933). In southern Europe, the Jewish population fell dramatically: in
Greece from about 100,000 in 1933 to just 7,000 in 1950; in Yugoslavia from about
70,000 to 3,500; in Italy from about 48,000 to 35,000; and in Bulgaria from 50,000
in 1933 to just 6,500 in 1950 (the reduction in the Bulgarian Jewish population
resulted from postwar emigration). The demographic focus of European Jewry
thus shifted from eastern to western Europe.
Before the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature
Jewish culture. By 1945, most European Jewstwo out of every threehad been
killed. Most of the surviving remnant of European Jewry decided to leave
Europe. Hundreds of thousands established new lives in Israel, the United States,
Canada, Australia, Great Britain, South America, and South Africa.
Copyright United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

ENCYCLOPEDIA LAST UPDATED: JANUARY 29, 2016