Final Solution
The Shoah ( Hebrew : , "catastrophe"), also known under the name of Holocaust , ie two thirds of the population total European Jewish and about 40% of the world's Jews during the Second World War , representing between five and six million victims estimated historians . This genocide of the Jews was for the Nazis 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question "(die der Endlsung Judenfrage). The French word for Holocaust is also used and its predecessor. The term "Judeocide" is also used by some to describe the Holocaust.
The extermination of the Jews, the Nazis' main target, was perpetrated by hunger in the ghettos of Poland and USSR occupied by the mass shooting of mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front (the "Holocaust by balls "), through the extermination by forced labor in concentration camps , in the " gas vans ", and in the gas chambers in extermination camps.
The horror of this "mass crime" led, after the war, development of legal concepts of " crime against humanity " and " genocide " , used later in other contexts ( Armenian genocide , the Tutsi genocide , etc.).. A very serious shortcoming of international humanitarian law has also been completed with the adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that protect civilians in time of war .
The extermination of Jews during World War II is distinguished by its industrial, bureaucratic and routine that makes it unique in the history of mankind . Paroxysm of anti-Semitism , this genocide has wanted to eliminate completely an entire population that posed no military threat or political executioners. Women, children (including infants) and elderly were systematically hunted down and equally dedicated to the mass death that adult men. In particular, 1.5 million children were victims of annihilation . The physical extermination of the Jews was also preceded or accompanied by their systematic plunder ( Aryanization ) and the destruction of a considerable part of their cultural or religious.
Perpetrated on the orders of Adolf Hitler , the crime has been mainly implemented by the SS and RSHA headed by Heinrich Himmler , as well as part of the Wehrmacht , and many experts and bureaucrats of the Third Reich. He received individual and collective complicity in all of Europe, particularly in movements collaborationist fascist or Nazi-inspired, and from governments or administrations have opted for state collaboration. Ignorance of the beginning and the indifferent or cowardly passivity of many also indirectly contributed to its completion. Meanwhile, many anonymous often risking their lives, devoted themselves to save the persecuted. Some of them received post-war period the honorary title of " Righteous Among the Nations "
The Third Reich also exterminated en masse the mentally disabled (their mass gassing at the Aktion T4 preceded and prefigured that of the Jews of Europe), Roma ( Porajmos ), the homosexuals and Slavs in particular Polish and Soviet but only the massacre of Jews was carried out relentlessly until the final days of camp.
The Holocaust is one of the most prominent and most studied contemporary history. Its impact moral, historical, cultural and religious has been immense and universal, especially since its rediscovery from the 1960 - 1970. In addition to historical investigation, the literature of the Holocaust offers a few tracks to many questions posed to human consciousness by nature exceptional and horror of the genocide.
In The Destruction of European Jews, Raul Hilberg, the Holocaust analysis as a process, whose steps are the definition of the Jews, their expropriation, concentration, and finally their destruction .
The first step is the law of April 7, 1933 on the restoration of the civil service (Gleichschaltung) which aims at the elimination of the state of all National Socialist regime opponents and primarily the Jews . The law stipulated the retirement of all non-Aryan . Followed the so-called Nuremberg Laws , in 1935.
The Jews are defined by Nazi law as the religion of their ancestors and their own confession. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered Jewish. A person with two Jewish grandparents also is regarded as Jewish if it is itself the Jewish religion, or if she is married to a person of that faith. If this is not the case, or if the person has only one Jewish grandparent, it is stored in a specific category, the Mischlinge . The definition of Mischlinge is arrested in 1935. From there, they remain subject to discriminatory measures concerning non-Aryans, but in principle escape further action, such as the destruction process, which will concern only Jews alone . From autumn 1941 the German Jews must wear a yellow star , a sign also made mandatory in 1942 through the territories occupied Europe, where the Nazis have done immediately identify and discriminate the Jewish population. On 28 July 1942 , when the extermination was in full swing, Himmler banned its experts continue to look up the definition of a Jew - so you do not tie the hands of torturers .
In general, the Nuremberg laws were quickly introduced as shown by German order in most countries conquered and occupied (Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, etc..). But several European countries had adopted for themselves from their own anti-Semitic legislation before the war, including the Fascist Italy of Mussolini in 1938 , the Hungary of Admiral Horthy , the Romania of Marshal Ion Antonescu , the Slovak Republic to Monsignor Tiso. In France , the Vichy government of Marshal Petain , resulting from the defeat of June 1940 , has established a discriminatory status of Jews from October 1940 . All these provisions have no target killing themselves, but they predispose leaders to collaborate on future deportations. And, isolating and weakening domestic and foreign Jews, they make them vulnerable when attempting occur Nazi extermination.
The expropriation takes the form of very strong incentives to sell the Jews on the companies they own ( Aryanization ) and then, from 1938 , sales of legally enforced. The concentration of Jews in the Reich buildings Reserved starts from ' April 1939 . This phase of expropriation is also implemented with variations due to local circumstances in all countries of Europe under Nazi domination .
The last step, the physical extermination, is emerging between 1938 and 1941.
Before the war, the goal is first to drive the Jews from persecution ever more radical. The list of prohibited occupations stretches endlessly, that bullying and also bans: their normal life is rendered impossible, to force them to emigrate from the Reich. But many refuse to leave their country, and from 1938 , the Nazi territorial expansion will put the policy into a deadlock: each expansion, the Reich absorbs more Jews than it comes out of its boundaries .
This situation arises when the Schedule ' Austria in March 1938 (the Anschluss is accompanied by an immediate outburst of brutality against the Jews, attacked, beaten, stripped and humiliated until the street) and then on attach the Sudetenland ( October 1938 ) and the entry of German troops in Prague on 15 March 1939. The conquest of Poland in September 1939 , is itself later than three million Jews under the thumb of the Nazis.
On 1 September 1939 , Hitler personally authorized the Aktion T4 , which results in the extermination by gassing of more than 150,000 mentally handicapped German in two years in "centers of euthanasia "for that purpose. Nazi forces also routinely shoot the terminally ill that they are in Poland and the USSR occupied. The continuity between this policy of eugenics and the Holocaust criminal is very important: number of specialists of euthanasia are then reassigned to mass gassing of Jews, which in turn comes from late 1941.
The physical elimination of Jews began from the Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938 , pogrom planned from above that is 91 fatalities across Germany and led to the arrest of 30,000 Jews led by camp concentration , the devastation of hundreds of stores and destroyed dozens of synagogues.
On 30 January 1939 , the sixth anniversary of his seizure of power in a thundering speech to the Reichstag , Hitler "prophesied" that if the Jews "provoke" a new world war, the consequence would be "extermination Jews of Europe ". Now it is the fulfillment of this "prophecy" that he himself as Goebbels and many Nazi leaders will make many references during the war.
In particular, when war becomes global in December 1941 with the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on the U.S. Reich, Hitler and his entourage are persuaded that it must "punish" the Jews, deemed responsible for the war that the Axis has itself caused, and therefore seen as guilty of the German losses at the front or the bombing of cities.
Haunted by the false myth of the " stab in the back "(Germany has lost the war in 1918 without being defeated militarily, but because she was betrayed from within, inter alia by the Jews), the Nazis also want to destroy the imaginary threat that represent communities of the continent. Many torturers will be persuaded to lead against these unarmed civilians struggle equally meritorious than the fighting at the front.
In his famous secret speech in Posen delivered in October 1943 , Himmler justified the need for Germans to kill as women and children because of the danger that one day they carry out reprisals against themselves or their own children. On this occasion he described the massacre being "glorious page in our history, and that will never be written."
At a time when they come into total war , the Nazis also want to burn their ships while committing a crime of such gravity that it makes impossible any compromise, leaving them the choice between fight to the end or assurance finish all convicted and punished.
Beyond that, the Holocaust is the logical culmination of ideological hatred absolute Semitic Nazi "race" that they consider not only lower, but fundamentally harmful and dangerous. Seen as "lice" and "vermin", excluded from humanity (to the point that no one will ever bother to establish any decree, condemning to death, let alone read victims), Jews have no place on earth - especially not in the living space ripped Eastern "subhuman" Slavs.
The Judeocide is in effect as part of its origins in the extensive remodeling project population of Europe developed by the Nazis, aided by a plethora of experts, geographers and scientists often highly educated. In the living space conquered the East, it is to make room for settlers in deporting German Slavs in bulk, but also in the sterilizing and reducing them to the status of a body of sub -Men doomed to slavery, while the same areas should be cleaned of Gypsies and Jews mostly by extermination.
As summarized by Mark Mazower, "genocide and colonization were inextricably linked, because the goal was full of Hitler's racial recomposition of Europe. " This is by no accident that the first expulsions and mass killings of Jews took place in the Polish territories annexed by the Reich and that they were "clean" and Germanize quickly as possible, thus Warthegau or near Danzig , and whether the city of Auschwitz , home to the largest concentration camp and Nazi extermination, was also to be redesigned to accommodate German settlers .
These projects are, however, a demographic point of departure. Because from the murder of Jews in the East, it is by extension, by pure ideological hatred, all the Jews of Europe and all over the world fallen under the sway of Hitler who must be killed (in 1943, see even the Nazis deport 200 Jews from air Tunis to the death camps, while Hitler asked in vain to his Japanese allies to attack the German Jews refugees Shanghai ).
From the conquest of Poland in September 1939 , nearly 10,000 Jews were shot by the Einsatzgruppen (only adult men, however). Polish Jews were confined in ghettos where deadly hunger, forced labor, abuse and extrajudicial killings are making cuts.
After the attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941 , however, the murderous violence unleashed an unprecedented scale: there are nearly 1.5 million Jews who perished in a few months, shot by the Einsatzgruppen, and this time , mostly women, children, old men or adult non-mobilized.
In 1940, the Madagascar Plan Germans still provided and forced mass emigration of Jews from occupied Europe to Madagascar , which would become a "Jewish reservation" . The continuation of the conflict with the United Kingdom prevents this solution to the "Jewish question" of success. In early 1941, Hitler is also considering deporting Jews to Siberia : This solution would have been enough to cause carnage and was therefore already in itself almost genocidal . But from the slowdown in the German advance in Russia in fall 1941 and even before the failure of the Wehrmacht to Moscow, this solution is no longer on the agenda.
The extermination of all Jews from Europe was decided in the autumn of 1941. On 31 July 1941 , the top SS leader Reinhard Heydrich is signed by Hermann Goering , No. 2 of the plan, a formal order secret entrusted research and implementation of a "final solution to the Jewish problem." Probably towards the end of summer, Adolf Eichmann was summoned into the office of Reinhard Heydrich , who said: "I go out from the Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler , the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler has now ordered the physical extermination of the Jews . "
For Raul Hilberg , the Holocaust is a crime of bureaucrats who move from one stage to another, carefully, logically, but without pre-established plan. This analysis was approved by the other specialists of the Holocaust, but the exact time when the genocidal intent appears as a part debated, discussed below under "Historiography" section.
The extermination of the Jews of Eastern Europe (1939-1941)
Ghettos
After the German invasion of Poland , the Jews of this country are forced to live in confined quarters, the ghettos. Living conditions are much harder for three reasons. First, those responsible for the concentration of Jews in Poland are often members of the NSDAP , and not, as in Germany, officials without party affiliation. Then the Polish Jews are what is most contemptible in Nazi mythology, and are the most persecuted before the war. Finally, Jews were much more numerically and proportionally, Poland (3.3 million, two million in the German area, about 33 million people across the country) in Germany .
Even within the ghetto, Jews movements are restricted: they must stay home from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00. External oversight is provided by the regular police and the domestic surveillance by the Security Police ( Gestapo and Kripo ), itself reinforced by the regular police, at the request of the latter .
From the 26 October 1939 , the principle of forced labor for Jews in Poland was adopted . Jews were decimated by malnutrition , and epidemics - including typhus , of tuberculosis , the flu - and the subsequent fatigue at work imposed on them by German authorities. For example, the ghetto of Lodz , which has 200,000 inhabitants at the beginning, more than 45,000 dead until August 1944 . During the year 1943 on the orders of Himmler , the ghettos are gradually reorganized into concentration camps. They are no longer civil administrations carers but SS. In Ostland , the killings continued until the virtual disappearance of Jews. From December 1941 , the survivors were deported to ghettos and killing centers. The first are the Jews of Wartheland , sent to Chelmno. In March 1942 , they are sent from Lublin to Belzec. From July, the Warsaw ghetto begins to be emptied .
The mobile killing units, the first wave of massacres
On 13 March 1941 , during preparations for the invasion of the USSR , Field-Marshal Keitel wrote a series of "order for special areas":
"In the zone of military operations at Reichsfhrer SS Himmler will be entrusted, on behalf of the Fhrer, the special tasks in preparation for the transition to administration policy - a task required in the final struggle that will be delivered between two political systems opposed. Under these tasks, the SS Reichsfhrer act independently and under his own responsibility . "
In simple terms, it was decided that the mobile units of the RSHA , the Einsatzgruppen, would be responsible for exterminating the Jews - as well as Gypsies, Communist cadres, even the disabled and homosexuals. This passage was dictated by Adolf Hitler in person .
During the first few weeks, members of the Einsatzgruppen, inexperienced in extermination, kill only Jewish men. From August, the central authorities to clarify their intentions, and Jews were murdered by entire families. Einsatzgruppen move in small groups, Einsatzkommandos to murder their victims. They are placed as close as possible to the front lines, even back to back after having killed their first victims. So, for example, the Einsatzgruppe A, approaching Leningrad with other troops then withdrew to the Baltic States and Belarus , destroying, among other things, the Jewish communities of Liepaja , Riga , Kaunas (in thirteen successive operations) and Vilnius (in fourteen attacks) . In the early months of the invasion of the USSR, mobile units announced nearly 100 000 deaths per month.
The SS are supported by part of the Wehrmacht. In many cases, soldiers sweep the Jews themselves for the Einsatzkommados the rifle, are themselves involved in the massacres, rifle, on the pretext of reprisals, the Jews. Thus, in Minsk, several thousand "Jews, criminals, Soviet officials and Asian gathered in an internment camp, and then murdered by members of the Einsatzgruppe B and the Secret Police of campaign . Their work is complemented by units trained by the leaders of the SS and Police, or more rarely the only Gestapo. This applies in particular to Memel (several thousands of victims), Minsk (2278 victims), Dnipropetrovsk (15 000 casualties) and Riga . Romanian troops are also involved shootings, and the Sonderkommando Latvian Viktors Arajs : alone responsible for the deaths of between 50,000 and 100,000 people (Jewish and / or communist), Arajs not be sentenced until 1979.
The killings are standardized procedures for rapid and effective. Einsatzgruppen usually choose a place outside the city. They develop an anti-tank ditch or digging a new pit. From a collection point, they bring the victims to divide into small groups starting with the men. Prisoners call then all they have as valuable to the head of the killers. Weather permitting, they must give their clothing and even their underwear.
Some Einsatzgruppen align front row ditches and then strafe left their lifeless bodies fall into the mass grave . Others take a bullet in the nape of each convict.
Paul Blobel and Ohlendorf , commander of Einsaztgruppen reject these methods are considered too stressful for the SS and prefer to distance shots. They use what has been called the "system of sardines," lsardinenmanier: A first row of victims should lie at the bottom of the ditch. It is shot from the top of the ditch in crossfire. The following lie to turn over the bodies of the first row and the shooting starts. At the fifth or sixth layer, the tomb is covered with soil . The Einsaztgruppen want their actions to be as unobtrusive as possible and try to act away from civilians and Wehrmacht .
Einsatzgruppen trying to provoke pogroms premises, both to reduce their workload and to involve a maximum share of the local population in the annihilation of the Jews. The bureaucrats of RSHA and commanding the army does not want such methods are used, some because these forms of killing them seem primitive and thus a poor efficiency compared to the extermination of the Einsatzgruppen careful; the others because these pogroms bad effect. The pogroms were therefore held mainly in areas where the military commander was not well assured of his authority in Galicia and in the Baltics, especially in Lithuania.
Within days, Lithuanians massacred 3800 Jews in Kaunas. Einsatzgruppen find more help and more sustainable forms of auxiliary battalions in the local population from the beginning of summer 1941. They were created, mostly in the Baltic countries and Ukraine. The Einsatzkommando 4a (the Einsatzgruppe C) decides not to shoot them as adults, taking care of Ukrainians murdered children. Sometimes, the ferocity of local staff to executives scared of the Einsatzgruppen themselves. This applies, in particular, members of the Einsatzkommando 6 (of Einsatzgruppe C), "literally terrified by the thirst for blood" that exhibits a group of "ethnic Germans" Ukrainian .
Recruitment in Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia is even easier than a strong anti-Semitism was rampant there before the war - in contrast to Estonia, where hatred of Jews was almost non-existent .
When the killers believe that killing will take time, they create ghettos in order to park the survivors, awaiting disposal. But in many cases, this creation is not necessary, particularly in Kiev : 33 000 Jews were murdered in a few days near Babi Yar .
While in Minsk on 15 August 1941 , Himmler attends a mobile killing operations. Shaken by the massacre but imbued with the transcendental importance of his actions, he asked his subordinates to seek a less traumatic for the SS to perform their duties .
Thus, the first gas vans were tested. From December 1941 , two to three gas vans were sent to each Einsatzgruppe. The process is always the same. The trucks are parked away. Groups of 70 Jews in underwear crammed inside. The exhaust gases are discharged within which suffocate victims. The truck then rolled to the ditch where the lifeless bodies are discarded . But the rain is damaging the sealing of trucks. Men suffer from headaches by unloading trucks, because all the exhaust gases were not dispersed. The vision of the disfigured faces of asphyxiated stress the SS .
According to the Nuremberg tribunal, about two million Jews were murdered by the mobile killing units - an estimate back to his account by Lucy S. Dawidowicz . Raul Hilberg has in turn 1.4 million victims, and Leon Poliakov 1.5 million, but this time for the USSR alone .
The Second Wave (1942)
The first wave of massacres essentially stops at the end of 1941, except in the Crimea where she continues until summer 1942.
A second wave of killings begins at the end of 1941 in the Baltic and spread throughout the year 1942 in the occupied territories .
The Einsatzgruppen play a lesser role. They are placed under the command of the supreme leaders of the SS and police. The size of the regular police are increasing much for taking part in the second wave of killings. At the end of 1942, 5 regiments of the regular police are on the front, 4 stationed at the rear, reinforced by six additional battalions that obey all the SS officers and police . Major cities and rural areas also provide areas occupied elements. Locally these elements are mainly composed of Balts, Ukrainians and Belarusians. They form the Schutzmannschaft (Schumi for short). Its workforce from 33 270 men in mid-1942 to 47 974 to the end of the year . The SS also receive support from the military police and military secret police .
In the Ostland, it remains early in the year 1942, approximately 100,000 Jews. About 68,000 live in large ghettos, the rest found refuge in forests, some as partisans. In January 1942 , the SS and police began to comb the northern region systematically area by area, killing the Jews of small ghettos and running those forests. Only a few thousand manage to escape alive . At the same time, prepares the destruction of large ghettos in the Ostland.
The method is often the same. The day before the shooting, a detachment of large hollow Jewish graves. At night or at dawn, the German forces enter the ghetto and the Jews together. Those who try to hide sometimes are performed with grenades. Those who gathered were brought by trucks to mass graves where they were executed by shooting. In late 1942, there are no more Jews in Ukraine.
Despite all precautions Himmler to keep the killings secret, photos taken by Allied soldiers, Hungarian or Slovak circulate. Himmler also fears that the Soviets discovered the graves one day, if the German army back. He orders Paul Blobel to erase the traces of the executions of the Einsatzgruppen. The Commando "1005" has the mission to reopen the graves and burning two million dead. But this work is imperfectly done for many reasons .
The massacres by bullets in the East after 1942
Again in November 1943 , to dismantle the economic empire that his subordinate Odilo Globocnik has earned around Lublin through the Jewish slave labor, Himmler ordered the massacre of the latter: in two days, over 40,000 Jews were murdered during what is known as "Operation Harvest Festival."
Other shootings of Jews in occupied Europe
Poland and the occupied Balkans have seen numerous massacres of Jews by shooting, but also by hanging, drowning or torture inflicted until death. The case of Romania, Serbia and Croatia are described below in Part VI of this article.
In Western Europe, the terror Nazi is less detailed forms and such public outbursts of savagery are hardly thinkable. The mass killings of Jews in the open air are thus remained rare or nonexistent. However, many hostages shot by the Nazis are often chosen from among the Jews.
Serge Klarsfeld has established more than a thousand hostages murdered in Fort Mont-Valerian , 174 were Jews The concentration camps and extermination (1942-1945) The physical elimination runs in the autumn of 1941 the German Jews and those from across occupied Europe. It is the decisive passage of a Judeocide previously located in the USSR to a genocide industrial planned the whole Jewish people and implemented throughout occupied Europe. From September to October 1941, German Jews were deported to turn deadly in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, even in areas of massacre in the USSR. 80 convoys leave the Reich and the end of 1941. In appalling conditions, 72 trains deliver their human cargo into ghettos where the shootings have vacated space (almost all perish gassed or shot to turn on settlements ghettos in 1942-1943). 8 other passengers are settled soon arrival . And October 15, nearly 5000 Jews deported from Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna and Breslau were deported to Lithuania and shot by the Einsatzgruppen when they got off the train: the report mentions Jger enforcement in Fort IX in Kaunas the 25 and 29 November. On 18 October, other convoys leaving Prague, Luxembourg and Berlin. All Grand Reich is concerned . Is tilted slightly more than a murder of Soviet Jewry to those of the European world when on October 2, Heydrich blast leaves six synagogues of Paris by the collaborationist Doriotistes the PPF , with explosives provided by its services to many show that France will never be the "citadel of European Jews" and that they must fear for their lives everywhere in occupied Europe. October 23, Himmler officially banned the emigration of Jews. Therefore remains more open than the option of extermination. On 7 December, the first extermination camp is open to Chelmno in Poland annexed: shootings "craft", the killing goes on an industrial scale. The victims, led all the Warthegau led by the fanatical Gauleiter Arthur Greiser , are enclosed in gas vans where they die slowly asphyxiated by exhaust fumes, directed at the vehicle. In seven months, over 100 000 people are in death. At the same time, the construction of Belzec and that of Sobibor are launched. Convened by Reinhard Heydrich , the Deputy Chief Heinrich Himmler , then this conference brings state secretaries of key ministries. Himmler and Heydrich were indeed necessary for the implementation of the deportations throughout Europe with the full cooperation of the German administration. In this regard, the Deutsche Reichsbahn society RAIL state has played a key role. The conference does not decide the genocide, the final solution of the Jewish people (die den enlosung Judenfrage) is already activated well before the start of the Wannsee Conference , on 20 January 1942 (originally scheduled for 9 December 1941 but postponed). The order was given in July 1941 by Hermann Goering to Heydrich . Among the Nazis, the issues do not decide at conferences. The only issue being discussed - and will also never resolved - is that of Mieschehe (Jews in Aryan spouse) and Mischlinge (half-Jews). The protocol shows that the greater part of the conference was dedicated to this issue solved. The other big question was that of German Jews working in arms factories, who get instant relief from deportation . The minutes of the conference, written by Eichmann , leaves no doubt about the criminal plan of systematic extermination. Over 11 million Jews throughout Europe (including British Jews, Swiss and Portuguese included in the statistical count carefully prepared by Eichmann) should be arrested and "evacuated" to the east where they will find death. This document is essential for historians to understand the decision process, even if it was clean so that nothing is written too compromising. Already the Nazis in fact use any specific code language that will serve to conceal their crimes in the years following until the end, deportation, extermination of Jews is so designated by the euphemism of "evacuation", the mass gassing as a "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) prisoners shipped to extermination by work as "parts" (Stck). Large synchronous raids are conducted throughout the European continent to feed extermination camps newly built. The process is similar everywhere. Jews of all ages and both sexes are hunted down and rounded up their homes, their workplaces, and even in orphanages, hospitals, insane asylums or nursing homes. Many simply say, especially in the beginning, the appointments made to them by fear, legalism, with no alternative, or in ignorance of what lies ahead. Under conditions generally very sordid men, women, children and elderly are parked in places that serve as an antechamber of the Nazi death camps: Drancy in France, the Dossin barracks in Mechelen in Belgium, Westerbork in the Netherlands or still Fossoli in Italy are among the most famous. At Terezin , in the Sudetenland , the Nazis opened the same 24 November 1941 a camp-style intended to deceive (successfully) the representatives of the Red Cross. This crowded ghetto, where families are not disrupted or forced labor imposed, offers hard living conditions but little deadly, and relatively privileged in comparison to what Jews know elsewhere. But most of the 140 000 people have passed by a majority of Czechs, were then deported to Auschwitz where they will be killed, especially during the liquidation of the "family camp" in April 1944. Driven to a station, the deportees were brutally crammed everywhere in cattle cars deliberately overloaded in a crowded and stressful health conditions decline, to almost nothing to eat or drink. The anxiety is compounded by ignorance of the destination (Pitchipo, as the inmates call the Drancy) and uncertainty about what awaits at the finish, though few imagined the killing industry. The trip is appalling, and more or less long (several hours to a day or two for Polish Jews, three to four days on average from France, more than two weeks for some convoys of Greece). It is not uncommon for deportees end up drinking their urine or lick their sweat. Some die in road, others go crazy or commit suicide (sometimes collectively). Few would attempt an escape, for fear of reprisals collective failure to provide safe haven or not to separate from their own, at last in ignorance of their future fate. These are beings already exhausted and devastated that happen to killing centers. National railway companies, including SNCF , have never shown any particular reluctance to move these trains, nor their employees (even if the railway were gestures of compassion, or handed to the relatives of the final tickets thrown convoys). Transportation costs were paid on the goods stolen from Jews, who were thus sent to finance their own death . However, there is no evidence that the Nazis systematically gave priority to the deportation convoys or military convoys of vital importance to the Reich. Convoys (a thousand people on average) are fully gassed if a death camp. In mixed camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek , a minority is designated arrival for forced labor and suddenly discovers the horror of concentration camps. In general, the extermination by forced labor leaves them no more than a few weeks or months to survive. Thus, only 7% of France's Jews designated for forced labor have seen the end of the war. Many convoys of Jews in Europe are already running to the camps of death in the early months of 1942. On 1 May 1941 , 168,972 Jews live in Germany, the fact remains that 131 823 to 1 January 1942 and 51 257 April 1 . In Slovakia from March to August 1942 , 75 000 of the 90,000 Jews deported from the country are already on government orders to Monsignor Tiso , before suspension of transport . They are deported Slovak who are the first victims in the summer of 1942 of the selection imposed on the Judenrampe arrival at Auschwitz. Summer 1942 was particularly fateful, with the big roundups of Jews almost simultaneous marking occupied Europe. During the summer of 1942, in fact, 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were deported en masse to Treblinka and gassed immediately. The first transport from the Umschlagplatz July 21. On 15 July 1942 , 1,135 Jews from Amsterdam called "to work in Germany" are immediately deported first to Auschwitz. The pace of raids and convoys is such that from September 1943 the Germans proclaimed the Dutch capital Judenrein (free of Jews). About 120 000 Dutch Jews, 105,000 were deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor , where only 5,500 survived. 80% of this community Sephardic this since the seventeenth century has been destroyed. The 16 and 17 July at the request of the Germans, the police of the Vichy regime arrested 13,152 foreign Jews during the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv , including 3,031 men, 5,802 women and 4 051 children. Interned at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande , they are mostly deported within two months. Other raids and deportations take place without return in the northern zone in the same time. July 15, 200 Jews are arrested in Tours , 66 to St. Nazaire. At Angers , the Sipo - SD acting alone stops 824 on 20 July 1942. In Lille , 15 September, 526 people were deported: 25 return. At Bordeaux , the regional prefect Sabatier and its general secretary for the Gironde Maurice Papon are from July 18 to a first convoy of 172 people with 10 others will follow until 5 June 1944 , totaling 1,560 victims. Although no German soldier is present in the southern zone , the French government accepts, if only in occupied Europe, to deliver the Jews living there, they are drawn from the harsh internment camps Gurs , Noah , Rcbdou, Les Miles, or they are victims of the roundup of 26 August 1942 attack in Lyon, Toulouse and other major southern cities (5885 foreign Jews arrested and deported). Between August 6 and September 15, 3456 internees and 913 workers extracted 18 GTE (groups of foreign workers) are also deported to Drancy and then Auschwitz . From 15 August, the SD starts rounding up the Jews of Antwerp with the active cooperation of municipal authorities. In Brussels / A>, where the mayor Jules Coester refused to assist the occupant, the raids in September give much less satisfactory results. Two-thirds of Jews were deported from Antwerp, cons third of those in Brussels . Therefore particularly numerous in 1942, the roundup of Jews continue at regular intervals in virtually every country in Europe until the end of German occupation and war. Generally, Jews working for German companies (including weapons) were deported last, and the privileged Jewish Councils. In 1943-1944, the military setbacks and the need for labor will force the Nazis to set aside a certain number of "Jewish labor" (Arbeitsjuden) in labor camps hard enough, but when their death n ' is not sought their deportation and at least delayed. Shootings and gas vans had permits from 1941-1942 to report Baltics and Ukraine judenrein (cleansed of Jews "). The pace of raids and deportations is such that by 1943 the Nazis may report judenrein Berlin June 19, Thessaloniki on August 20, or Amsterdam in September. After that Belzec, the extermination camp of Sobibor is open 1March 1942 , that of Treblinka on July 1 , that of Majdanek near Lublin in the fall. They are primarily intended for mass gassing of Jews in Poland - though due to an epidemic of typhus in Auschwitz, 34 convoys of Dutch Jews were diverted to Sobibor in 1943, and therefore completely destroyed, along with four convoys of Jews France. These camps serve only to kill, only a few hundred deported hundreds of thousands were "spared" to help as slaves to the basic operation of the camp. The victims were killed in carbon monoxide (the Zyklon B in Majdanek) in the gas chambers where they are carried down from their train. Treblinka is intended primarily for Jews of Warsaw, Lublin Majdanek those, Belzec and Sobibor assuming the massacre of Jews in other industrial ghetto Jews of the General Government. The goal is to systematically exterminate. On 17 March 1942 , with the first convoy of Jews of Lublin to Belzec began the "Action Reinhardt" decided on 20 January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference in the suburbs of Berlin and would have given this name in honor of Reinhard Heydrich , who was killed by Czech resistance late May 1942. It will make two million lives and mean the death of over 90% of the Jewish community in Poland, until then the largest in the world. Thus, the year 1942 is by far the deadliest year in extermination centers (Auschwitz off). At 31 December 1942 , 1,449,000 people were killed in the camps to carbon monoxide. Upon decommissioning in 1943-1944, 1.75 million people will have died while in . At Auschwitz-Birkenau , the use of Zyklon B (which kills 36 times faster than carbon monoxide) is tested on prisoners from the Soviet 3 September 1941. Beginning 1942 , the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess , receives verbal order of Himmler to the camp, ideally located at a railway junction, the main center for extermination of Jews deported from all over Europe. Several crematorium are built, linking the gas chambers in crematoria large capacity designed to remove the bodies. The first train of the French victims from Auschwitz and to the 28 March 1942 , the first transport of Jews from Salonika on 20 March 1943 , the first in Rome on 16 October 1943 , five weeks after the occupation of Italy, and the first convoy of Hungary on 15 May 1944. With the dismantling of other extermination camps in late 1943, Auschwitz became the main place of performance of the genocide. On more than one million people who are murdered, 90% are Jewish, of all countries. Although one sixth of Holocaust victims are killed, it is therefore right that "Auschwitz" has come to refer by metonymy the entire genocide. Especially since this concentration camp and extermination, the largest of all, has left important remains and a number of survivors, instead of the main camps, dismantled and demolished, that have no surviving off some escaped and miraculously (two survivors cons over 150,000 gassed at Chelmno , four cons 650,000 dead Belzec ). From July 1942 , a "selection" takes place at the arrival of each new convoy of deportees. At a gesture from the hands of SS appraisers, the deportees are valid reserved forced labor. Those deemed unfit to work are immediately taken to the gas chamber: babies, children, elderly, infirm, pregnant women, those too old, or just those who wear glasses or admit to practice a profession or a trade intellectual non-manual. In his memoirs, Rudolf Hss estimated that at least three quarters of the deportees perished upon arrival in the gas chamber, the majority of women and all children, the elderly and disabled. According to him, more people were selected for gassing during the winter, when the concentration camp was less need for labor . Franciszek Piper, the historian of Auschwitz, estimates that 65% of prisoners (97 150 000 000 on Western Jews) were gassed upon arrival. It confirms the sexual differentiation of the killing: 77.5% of women and Belgian girls were gassed upon arrival, but 51% of men, or 49% of men set apart and identified by the Department of Labor (Arbeitsstatistik) Auschwitz . According to Georges Wellers , about 61,098 Jews deported from France between 29 July 1942 and 11 August 1944 , 78.5% were gassed upon arrival. For the historian Danuta Czech, 76.6% of Greek Jews had to be too. As for the Jews of Holland, between 17 July 1942 and 5 September 1944 , 57 convoys brought Westerbork 51,130 casualties, of which 18 408 were designated employable, 64% others gassed immediately . Perversely, the deportees are being conducted in selected gas chambers on reassuring words, and are persuaded to undress and enter the room to take a shower - but at the slightest attempt at resistance or doubt, c is the latest brutality they are forced to enter and be crammed. Victims die within minutes after the doors close and the spread of deadly gas. Those who are closest to the place where the gas leaves die first. Many are severely injured or die trampled in stampedes vain during which victims generally seek to force the gates, or competing for spots where there is still some air . The Sonderkommando , composed of mostly Jewish prisoners and periodically liquidated, is responsible for the incineration of corpses after getting hair and gold teeth. Reducing casualties in Ash soon dispersed reflects the desire of the Nazis to conceal evidence of their crime and symbolizes their desire to erase the last traces of Jewish existence on earth. Hundreds of trains lead in the Reich property stolen from murdered, after storage at the section called "Canada" camp. The hair of the victims are used to make clothing. However, the making of soap from human fat incinerators is the legend. The industry of death peaked at Auschwitz with the liquidation in August 1944 to 67,000 last victims of the ghetto of Lodz , the last remaining still in Poland, and especially with the deportation of 56 days over 435,000 Hungarian Jews by Adolf Eichmann , from May 15 to July 8, 1944. Over a third of the Jewish victims of Auschwitz were Hungarian. Hungary knew a strong anti-Semitism since the late nineteenth century, exacerbated by the involvement of many Jews in the short-lived Soviet Republic "was founded in 1919 by Bela Kun. In September 1919 , 3,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of the White Terror, and in 1920, Mikls Horthy , regent of the Kingdom of Hungary , enacted the earlier anti-Semitic legislation in Europe, radicalized in 1938-1939 and then in 1941. Since 1939, the legal definition of the Jew was the same race, the 100 000 Jews from Catholic is therefore also victims of discrimination. In the summer of 1941, Budapest had deported 18,000 Jews from Hungary "stateless" in Ukraine, at the rear of the Russian front. The 27 and 28 August, over 10,000 of them were exterminated by the Einsatzgruppen C -Kamianets Podilskyi first massacre of Jews to reach five figures, and key step in the transition to large-scale extermination. Only from 2000 to 3000 of these first Hungarian deportees survived the summer. Following this episode, the government suspended the deportations in German area. But the Hungarian army runs on its side a thousand Jews in the territories annexed to Serbia, and most importantly, it requires Jews to Hungary a "labor service" to the army especially murderer: the victims of this service are not officially deportees, and they retain such property and homes in their absence, but in fact, more than 42 000 people and taken away to work in occupied Ukraine to die even before the turn of March 1944 .. Admittedly, on several occasions, the Regent Horthy refused to totally eliminate the Jews of the country's life, just as it accepts Hitler's repeated requests to deport them or make them wear the yellow star. Hungary is thus figure on asylum in Europe in the Holocaust, some Jews from even find refuge from neighboring countries. Although 63,000 Hungarian Jews and stateless persons have lost their lives since before March 1944, while not really change abruptly and radically with the arrival of German troops, supported by the collaborationist fascists, the Arrow Cross. On 19 March 1944 , in fact, the Nazis invaded its ally Hungary, which is considering tacking on the approach of the Red Army. The new prime minister, Sztojay Dome , is cooperating fully with the Germans. The process of concentration and deportation of Jews it repeats the same pattern elsewhere since 1939, but particularly so fast: yellow star compulsory establishment of Jewish councils, confinement in ghettos and deportations. They concern only the Jews of the provinces and the outskirts of Budapest, the capital of those remaining for the time spared. Of these 435,000 Jews deported provincial active from May 15 to July 8, 1944, with the help of the Hungarian police, only 10% were put to forced labor, the others being exterminated on arrival at Birkenau . To accelerate the pace of killing in the derivation of a section of main line railway was built which, once crossed the porch like a tower from the camp to come close to the gas chambers. It installs a ramp for the descent of the deportees and selection. This ramp will become one of the best known symbols of Auschwitz and genocide. Crematories no longer sufficient to incinerate all carcasses at a sufficient rate, thousands of them are burned in open air on huge pyres. At this time, Auschwitz receives up to four trains daily, and killing operations by Zyklon B to kill 10,000 people a day. Admiral Horthy, who had allowed the transport at first, withdrew its permission on July 9, while information on the extermination arrive in Hungary and the Vatican or the United States increasing pressure. Sztojay was dismissed in August by Horthy. The deportations are suspended until 15 October, when 150,000 Jews and refugees are still residing in Budapest, where they survive as best they could in the ghetto , stripped of everything. Between March and October 1944, moreover, are still 150,000 Jews sent to "labor service" under the auspices of the Hungarian army, of which only 20,000 will return .. On 15 October, Horthy was arrested by the Nazis and the collaborationist replaced by the Arrow Cross , which set up a Hungarian fascist government. Led by their leader, the new Prime Minister Ferenc Szalasi , the Arrow Cross revived the persecution, and increase on-site disordered massacres of Jews and death marches. A number of remaining Jews in Budapest were saved by diplomatic protection, especially through the work of Raoul Wallenberg. In 1941, 825,000 Jews lived on the territory of Hungary, 100 000 or converted Christians of Jewish descent. 63,000 were killed even before 19 March 1944. After that date, 618,000 were victims of the deportation to Auschwitz , the death marches or sent to labor service in the army: 501 500 lost their lives. 116 500 Hungarian Jews returned from exile, 20 000 Department of Labour, and 119 000 other survivors remained in Budapest . In total, 225,000 Hungarian Jews survived (31%), which is very strong across the central and eastern Europe, their community has lost 569,507 members, including 564 507 5 000 killed and others exiled. The Nazi concentration camps were a hell rarely equaled in human history. Through a systematic process of dehumanization and evil of their victims, SS and Kapo were designed to destroy their personality and their life in a very short time, through malnutrition, beatings, lack of hygiene and forced labor. Inhumane treatment of deportees did not leave a very short period to live: in 1942, deported to Auschwitz three months average survival expectancy. On four trains more than 1,000 Czech Jews arrived each of the 17 to 25 April, and have not undergone selection for gas at the finish, yet one does not count to 15 August only 182 survivors. Raul Hilberg notes that the extermination through work, with peaks of cruelty, however, has constituted a small portion of the Shoah. Even in Auschwitz, about 200 000 Jews interned, it was recorded "only" 90,000 deaths. The extermination by forced labor has killed ten times less than the gassing of 865,000 people in the same camp . Separated from their families (often only survivors or almost so other members have already been killed by gassing), the Jewish prisoners who escaped the first selection on arrival are stripped of all their property and any personal memory, fully clipped Deprived of their name and wearing a striped uniform and a badge by which they are only called. They are operated in factories of war in favor of the SS who "rents" to entrepreneurs at rock bottom prices: for example, the chemical giant IG Farben example is seriously undermines the holding of prisoners of Auschwitz. They can also be used to work absurdly unnecessary (digging holes filled, every night, wear and bring stones from one place to another ...). They are exposed to malnutrition and systematic treatment of wild Kapos often recruited from among common criminals. Weaken those who become "Muslims "and rejected by their fellow inmates exposed to the liquidation by the SS doctors at the infirmary (nursing) camp or selection for the gas chamber. The few survivors (usually those who were deported in the past, at a time when the Reich at risk extends a little over the life of his slave labor) need to get out morally hardened, pass unnoticed, having much luck, work in Kommandos less painful and less dangerous. The last gassings take place late November 1944 in Auschwitz , while the Nazis at bay begin to destroy the facility and evidence of genocide. The killing does not stop either. And from 8 November 1944 , Adolf Eichmann submit tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to a "death march" trying to Budapest at the border of the Reich. On 20 January 1945 , slightly less than 60,000 survivors of Auschwitz were evacuated on foot to Germany at the approach of the Soviets. Evacuation is usually portrayed by the survivors as one of their worst memories of deportation: without proper clothing or shoes in the very harsh winter, exhausted and malnourished, they should walk up to several tens of kilometers per day. Those who can not follow immediately slaughtered by the SS escort. Other inmates are crowded into trains that transfer from one camp to another at the cost of considerable mortality. At Ravensbrck , Dachau or Bergen-Belsen , where many former inmates fail Auschwitz exhausted, epidemic typhus caused a massacre. The disease carries including Anne Frank on 12 March 1945 in Bergen-Belsen. In April, the Allies approached, new death marches and new trains murderers evacuate the prisoners. In total, from January to May 1945 , "around 250,000 Jews died from exhaustion or cold during these walks, when they were not shot on site or burned to death . They are distraught and traumatized survivors and piles of corpses skeletal usually discover that allied soldiers incredulous. 40% of the liberated Jews were killed in the weeks following: "Their condition was outside the jurisdiction of Western medicine . With tons of goods stolen from murdered Jews, crematoria or the remains of gas chambers, the world finds himself in 1945 before the evidence of mass murder that would lead to the Nuremberg trials at the birth of the concept of crime against humanity. Submitted to the German military authorities, Serbia knows the Holocaust in particular ways. The various German officials ( SS , Wehrmacht) of this territory are particular zeal to physically eliminate the Jews - and Gypsies - in the territory they administer. The definition and concentration of Jews carried out in a few months. General Franz Bhme is run by shooting all the Jews and Gypsies male, between autumn 1941 and spring 1942 , reproducing the orders to the Einsatzgruppen. Women and children were rounded up and interned in camps in November and December 1941. They are killed by gassing with carbon monoxide between January and May 1942. In August 1942 , the head of administrative staff in Serbia wrote a note to his new supervisor, mentioning in particular that: "Serbia, where the only question and Jewish Roma issue resolved. "(" Land einziges Serbien und in dem Judenfrage Zigeunerfrage gelst. ") The sixteen thousand Jews of Serbia were destroyed to the last. If the speed and the relative novelty of the destruction of the Jews of Serbia are due to the initiative of local officials, Nazi leaders did nothing to hold them, quite the opposite: the idea of shooting of Jewish men is suggested first by Adolf Eichmann, the truck and gassing is provided by the authorities in Berlin . After the invasion of Yugoslavia by Germany, Hitler authorized the creation of the Independent State of Croatia , a satellite of Germany, led by the organization fascist Ustasha. The extermination of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies is provided primarily by the Croatian authorities, in concentration camps such as Jasenovac , until 1942. The Nazis then get permission from the Croatian government to deport the survivors to extermination camps. Member of the Axis, the Romanian dictator Antonescu was responsible for the deaths of about 200,000 Jews, making employees Romanian most important participants of the Holocaust after the Nazis and Croatian Ustasha before. Romania was home to prewar Jewish community of the third Europe, according to the census of December 1930. An anti-Semitic tradition it was firmly established: Romania was the last country to emancipate its Jews in 1919. Shortly before the Second World War, the government undertakes an anti-Semitic policy, excluding Jews from the railways, imposing quotas in the industrial workforce, and revoke a section of officials of the Jewish faith . On 8 August 1940 , the persecution takes on a racist Jews converted to Christianity are considered Jews in the same way that people of Jewish religion. However, Jews who had Romanian citizenship to 30 December 1918 , their descendants, the Jews who had fought during the First World War (about ten thousand persons) were exempt from some discrimination . In February 1941 , the fascists of the Iron Guard perpetrate a pogrom in Bucharest bloody. 118 deaths were identified. The bodies were horribly mutilated . After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Romanian army, allied with the Wehrmacht, actively participates in the mass murder of Jews. On 25 June 1941 , the army, the gendarmerie e Romanian police murdered 7,000 Jews in Iasi. Six days after the entry of Romanian troops in Odessa, a bomb kills Glogojanu General, commander of Odessa and 40 other soldiers . The same evening, the Romanian government ordered relentless retaliation. Immediately, the new commander of Odessa, General Trestioreanu said he would take steps to hang the Jews and Communists in public places. During the night 5000 people were executed. October 23, 19,000 Jews were executed and their bodies doused with petrol and burned . Thousands more were imprisoned as hostages. October 24, imprisoned Jews were transported out of town and shot in front of anti-tank ditches in groups of 40 or 50. The operation was proving too slow, the remaining 5,000 Jews were locked in three warehouses, then strafed warehouses were burned. 40 000 Jews are killed that day . 24 to the evening, Marshal Antonescu demand that the hostages who are not dead yet experiencing the same suffering that Romanians killed in the explosion. The victims were taken to a warehouse, shot. The warehouse is blasted on October 25, the day of the funeral of Romanian victims of the attack on October 22 . On November 1, the city has only 33,885 Jews, mainly women and children who live in terror in the ghetto . The Jews of Odessa and the region are then deported to Romania Bogdanovci, and Domanevka Acmecetca. They are housed in appalling conditions, crammed into ruins, stables or barns. They suffer from many diseases before being slaughtered in the month of December . Special case of genocide in Europe is a territory-wide, Transnistria , which is transformed in the territory of extermination. 217 757 Jews died, including 130 000 87 757 Soviet citizenship and Romanians. 139 957 victims were killed by Romanians , probably not appear as a mere satellite of the Third Reich. Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt in particular wanted to clarify the responsibility of the victims themselves, who often by their passive and submissive, have made it easier for perpetrators . Thus, the killing of 1.5 million Soviet Jews did not cost even if only one wounded to the executioners, as for example, 300 000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were deported and smooth without resistance at Treblinka in summer 1942. The issue of "collaboration" of some Jews to be deported to their own people was also raised from the days of harsh divisions within the victims, and painful controversy after the war. Jews believe, above all, to survive, including feeding. They always know the fear and terror. Driven from their jobs or their homes, deprived of all their rights and their livelihoods by Aryanization and anti-Semitic laws, they are excluded from normal life by an ever more complete arsenal of banned most petty. They can for example use some streets or out of their ghetto when it exists, they can not enter certain shops or make their children play in parks, they can go shopping at certain times negative, they are working under forced humiliating (sweeping the streets, doing earthwork, etc..), they can not own a radio or bicycle, they must put in the back of trams and metros (when they can still borrow) sometimes they are not even allowed to sit on park benches or use telephone booths. When they hide it in a more or less difficult, more or less precarious. Some survive up for years in basements, attics or hidden parts narrow, or in forests. Seen today by millions of people, "Annex" where eight people including Anne Frank lived hidden two years is actually relatively comfortable compared to the common lot of most Jews camouflaged. In tragic circumstances, the ghettos have struggled to maintain a life through cultural, musical and artistic rich and remarkable. Aware that their community was doomed to total annihilation and that no one could witness one day of their fate, as archivists Ringelblum everywhere held in Warsaw chronicles the life of the ghettos, and buried regularly documents and materials related to Daily future murdered. Many Jews in occupied Europe were holding newspapers at the heart of the persecution, as in Amsterdam young Anne Frank , or Hillesum Etty , known for the high spirituality that developed in the test. The Contemporary Jewish Documentation Centre and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France were founded in 1943 in full secrecy. Under the Vichy regime in particular, legalism and obedience to traditional authority and the desire to be good citizens led many Jews to submit to discriminatory laws and to allow identification. Many others, out of pride, refused to hide their Jewishness, agreeing to declare themselves Jews or wear blush without the yellow star , and refusing to flee before the enemy. Many prospective deportees thought impossible a betrayal of their own government, hoping in vain to end they would be protected from the Germans by the prestigious and charismatic Marshal Petain. The patriotism or even nationalism of many German Jews did not and restrictive emigration from the Reich before the war. Despite the contradictory information and rumors that circulate regularly on the massacres, the uncertainty is complete on their ultimate fate, or unimaginable hardly credible, and while lying to yourself is sometimes simply necessary for psychic survival. It is not uncommon that we refuse to believe the shootings or mass gassings in Poland even as they take a few tens of kilometers away. Even the arrival at Auschwitz is not always enough to decillions in some. The Nazis also know deceive their victims until the final moments. Upon arrival at Treblinka , the illusion of a normal station is maintained by the presence of a fake window, a sign of "destination Byalistock" and a false clock whose hands are painted. At Auschwitz, some gas chambers were decorated with a time of false showerheads. Many Jews also perish because they refuse informed consent to be separated from their families or because they want to share the fate of their friends, their community, their people. Thus, despite the warning is the massacre of 14,000 Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941 , the great historian Simon Dubnow refuses to hide, and is part of the 27 000 Jews murdered in the city on 8 December 1941. In Warsaw, Dr.Janusz Korczak , his renowned putting away, part voluntarily with children of his orphanage and dies with them in the gas chambers at Treblinka ( 5 August 1942 ). The blackmail was not absent from the refusal to try to escape. The letters written by Etty Hillesum from Westerbork, the Dutch Auschwitz lobby, describe how the candidates were discouraged by the escape the Jewish leaders of the camp who accused them of selfishly putting in danger the lives of others who would be deported to their place. Studying the behavior of Jews during the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, Raul Hilberg notes that Jews are not prepared to fight against the Germans, or even to flee. Soviet authorities evacuated all persons endangered areas necessary for the economy. Many Jews were among them, or mobilized from the Red Army. For cons, the least educated, most fragile, the elderly, women, children, must fend for themselves . The Einsatzgruppen were quick to identify weaknesses in their prey. They do not hesitate to use the Jews to carry out their hounding. In Vinnitsa, the head of the Einsatzgruppe uses the rabbi of the community. He asks her to bring the Jews of the city for registration. After the meeting of all Jews, he did shoot . Elsewhere posters are pasted to gather the Jews for "resettlement." Many Jews who had fled into the countryside before the arrival of the Nazis, are forced to return home because they find no help and no refuge. There they are caught and killed . Raul Hilberg also emphasizes that in the actions of the Einsatzgruppe, there are usually between 10 and 50 victims to a killer. But these killers are well armed and determined. Jews can not exploit their numerical superiority . Disoriented Jews are accustomed to obey. Executions carried out by Einsaztgruppen do not cost a single life to the Germans . From the time and especially in the years 1960-1970, harsh controversies surrounding the role of the Jewish Councils (Judenrat) installed on an idea of Eichmann in charge of all ghettos in Europe, as well as forces Jewish police acting on their orders. Compulsory associations created at the behest of the Nazis to organize communities in occupied countries (the General Union of Jews in France , the Association of Jews in Belgium) have similarly been accused of having acted as a relay to the Nazis. It has existed in Europe about a thousand Jewish Council, including some 10 000 people were members . In a collaborative first purely technical and administrative advice many have moved to a collaboration in the deportation itself, by an illusion of political concessions would save the "essential" by sacrificing part of their but also, ultimately, to safeguard their positions of power and privilege, or simply to save their own lives and those of their protgs by demonstrating their willingness and effectiveness. Legacy of centuries of persecution, many Jews were more accustomed to negotiating and cowering silently than fight. In Russia and Poland, the pogroms of the past had demonstrated their isolation in a very anti-Semitic society, and the violence only turned to murder as if there were attempts at resistance. The past had also used the Jewish leaders to try to save the "essential" while waiting out the storm, the most cruel persecutions have always had a purpose. It was not easy to suspect even think they were this time against an enemy determined to destroy them totally. Fairly representative of these illusions is the speech in Vilna by the Jewish leader Jacob Gens: "When they ask me thousand Jews, I give them. For if we Jews, we do not our own will, the Germans will come and take what they want by force. So they will not take a thousand people, but thousands and thousands. By leaving hundreds, I save a thousand. By delivering a thousand, I save ten thousand . " In the USSR, representatives of the most courageous communities were liquidated before the Germans arrived, completing the purge of Jewish elite of its representatives less docile. That which remains "tends to be submissive, fearful and informer" (Paul Johnston) , especially since officials were receiving food and material privileges, and therefore cooperates with the census, to plunder, deportations. In Lodz, Poland, the controversial Chaim Rumkovski behaves in real dictator of some 200,000 Jews crammed into the ghetto , going so far as to print a stamp with his image. He chose immediately to the ghetto to serve the German war effort, providing the workforce of 117 small textile factories produced uniforms for the Wehrmacht. His police involved in arrests and deportations of Jews from arrest and their co-religionists, sometimes ruthlessly, and tracking down those who went into hiding or unresponsive at first. Gradually emptied by the deportations, the ghetto of Lodz, however, survives up so late that in August 1944. Rumkovski and his family were deported in the last convoy, and the man was possibly killed by the prisoners themselves during the journey . Similarly, the Jewish Council of Amsterdam was deported last once the town "cleansed" of all its Jews. All Jewish councils have not agreed to compromise. On 30 September 1942 , the Judenrat of Ternopil and refuses to participate in the organization of transport to the camps. In Minsk and Bialystok , boards are even very close to the Jewish Resistance and act in harmony with it . Symbol of the tragic impasse that met many of them, the Dean of the Warsaw Ghetto , Adam Czerniakw , killed himself in July 1942 to avoid having to collaborate in the deportation of children and old people. His action will not prevent the Nazis emptied the ghetto of its 300 000 inhabitants in the following weeks. All the Jews did not passively accept their fate. A number have committed suicide, sometimes whole families, rather than be deported. Jews have refused to leave during transport, thus Przemyl in Biaystok , etc.. In general, they paid with their lives as soon . In a reversal of Semitic legends on "Jewish cowardice," the Israelites are overrepresented in the resistance movements inside and outside, and this throughout occupied Europe. Thus, the Jews of France accounted for 5% of the Companions of the Liberation , then they are less than 1% of the population. Thousands lost their lives in the resistors in each country. However, especially in the West, many of the Jewish resistance fighters are "assimilated" who do not consider themselves as Jews or more, and do not stand up as Jews. As a result, they often refuse to pay special attention to the plight of Jews for fear of being accused of favoring a group of victims compared to others, and not worry that their co-religionists. Generally, they believed it was necessary above all to worry about winning the war, and that victory would stop the persecution and would return the deportees. They were unaware of the specific destruction - and unimaginable - who was expecting their own people. A specifically Jewish resistance also existed, but did not necessarily not done much for the fight against the deportation a priority. Thus the Jewish battalions of the MOI in France, linked to the CPF , they were primarily invested in sabotage or attacks against occupation forces. Jewish armed resistance particularly in Eastern Europe faces significant barriers. No experience of arms by centuries of discrimination, most Jews are unaware of their use, nor can often resolve to break the cultural taboos and religious violence. The fatalism of religious inspiration was sometimes able to play its role. The most likely to fight emigrated to Palestine before the war or, in the USSR, are mobilized in the Red Army. The weapons are extremely difficult to obtain. We can often expect help from local resistance movements, not always free themselves of prejudice and even violence Semitic. The constant terror that many prefer to negotiate or bend the spine as an attempt to fight alone, without hope, radically unequal, that rush of revenge killings. The vast majority of Jews will first seek to survive and feed themselves. Finally, political divisions, social and religious tradition alive in communities do not help. In Eastern Europe, in the ghettos , resistance end, however, organized as is the case in the USSR in Riga to Kaunas , and even Vilnius. From December 1941 , the Organization of Minsk fighters joined the ranks of the first Soviet partisans. An armed uprising was reported as early as 20 July 1942 at Nesvizh in Belarus , and several other ghettos also revolted that summer. In general, these uprisings are accompanied by leakage of mass, but most are caught and killed. Even within the ghetto of Kaunas (Kovno), an ongoing guerrilla war raging against the Germans. In Warsaw , the debate between those who are harsh condemnation of any armed resistance, suicide, and those who want to witness the world and to posterity that the Jews were not exterminated left without a fight. On 28 July 1942 is founded the Jewish Fighting Organization , which, uncharacteristically, manages to combine both the Zionists that the Communists and the Bund , only the Zionists "revisionists" (right) which still stands apart. While more than 500,000 original inhabitants of the ghetto, the fact remains that less than 90 000 in spring 1943, a thousand fighters under the command of young and charismatic Mordechaj Anielewicz trigger 19 April 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. No illusions about the end that awaits all, they explicitly intend to demonstrate to posterity a Jewish resistance existed. In fact, much to the fury of Hitler himself, the ghetto insurgent manages to hold at least five weeks against SS General Jrgen Stroop. Despite its ridiculous means it is submerged after a struggle, where the whole European states had surrendered without fighting or had fought as long. Armed revolt also took place in 1943 in the ghettos of Sosnowiec , Bialystok , Czestochowa , Tarnw , Vilnius. Song of the poet Vilnius Yiddish and partisan leader Abba Kovner has remained the anthem of the Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. Revolts most unlikely and most spectacular occurred at the very heart of the extermination camps. On 2 August 1943 , inmates at Treblinka rise and some managed to escape. The episode accelerates the decision to disband the center of killing. The event is repeated on 14 October 1943 at Sobibor , the scene of a revolt remarkably well prepared, synchronized throughout the camp. At Auschwitz-Birkenau , on 7 October 1944 , inmates in charge of the Sonderkommando burn the gassed manage to blow up the crematorium No. IV and shoot some guards before they are all killed. The Jews have not only survived through some traumatic experiences, whether they have been deported. They have generally lost their families, in whole or in part. Often they have been dispossessed without always being able to recover their property. In the East or Holland, it's practically their entire community that has been eradicated: their world is even more a culture and a world gone never to return. In Eastern Europe, the Holocaust did not eliminate the anti-Semitism , and survivors are often insulted on their return, even mistreated or killed if they try to regain the property they have stolen in their absence. No fewer than 150 Jews were murdered in Poland released in the first four months of 1945, 1200 and before April 1946. Country is even produce new pogroms. In Kielce on 4 July 1946 , the lie of a runaway boy accusing Jews of having kidnapped for ritual murder caused the massacre of 42 Jews by the mob. These tragedies are accelerating the migration of survivors from Poland, and often outside Europe. Thus, more than 60,000 Polish Jews fled to occupied Germany in 1946-1947. Also occurs in a pogrom in September 1945 in Velk Topolcany in Slovakia , or in May 1946 to Kunmadaras Hungary . Often very numerous in the communist forces, the Jews are easily assimilated by the whole population to diets that are taking place under the new Soviet occupation. Within 18 months after the end of the war, they kill more Jews in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 10 years preceding the conflict. "Those who lost more than anyone who is to blame for the suffering of others" . From 1948, Stalin sought to exploit popular anti-Jewish resentment by triggering the USSR throughout the Eastern bloc an anti-Semitic campaign. By 1946, he had to censor the Black Book written by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman on the Nazi massacres of Jews in the Soviet Union. The Jewishness of the victims of Babi Yar massacre sites and other is blurred, and Hitler's main crime is hidden from people until the end of the communist world. If survivors of Western Europe are generally returned home and stayed there, it is not the same for those of Eastern Europe, which not everyone does, and finds himself increasingly facing the anti-Semitic campaign that develops in the Communist bloc from 1948. The "DP" (Displaced Persons) Jews are first treated as other refugees and displaced persons, without regard for the particular tragedy they have endured. That means they are often put in the same camps as their former persecutors Ukrainian, Baltic, Russian, etc.. At least until August 1945 , when U.S. President Truman put aside the fact. A number of survivors managed to emigrate to the United States or Western Europe. However, if some help to fill the need for arms, those of the Oriental Jews who have studied or have a non-manual occupation are not welcome. As for the British, they continue to close Palestine to Jewish emigration, intercepting illegal immigrants to their internment in Cyprus and Rhodes. In 1947 , the fate of Exodus, shocked international opinion: the ship out of Ste with more than 4,500 survivors is indeed repressed by the British, who eventually landed force passengers, especially in a German port, ultimate indiscretion. The scandal contributed in part to the decision of the UN to partition Palestine and allow the birth of a Jewish state, especially intended to serve as a refuge and new homes for survivors. Between 1948 and 1951 , 332,000 European Jews leave for Israel from camps in Germany or Eastern Europe. 165 000 others will go to France, Great Britain, Australia and America . Thus, of 90 000 200 000 Romanian Jews leave between 1948 and 1951, as 39,000 of the 55,000 Slovak Jews survivors, or the latter half of the 15,000 Yugoslav Jews . Paradoxically, these are communities untouched by the genocide as those of Bulgaria or a fortiori of Turkey neutral who know the most massive emigration to Israel. The disappearance of the cultural area of Sephardic , which began with the Holocaust, becomes irreversible, leaving only a few thousand Jews in these countries . Similarly, rampant anti-Semitic campaign in Poland after the Communist Six Day War ( 1967 ) from finished to almost all of the 300 000 Jews still in the country. Mass emigration largely completed so that the Holocaust had pursued and achieved by murder: dump the Eastern Europe of its Jews. In general, survivors of the Holocaust were not listened to their feedback, even when they had the desire or the strength to speak. Few and drowned in the mass of returnees and victims of war, they were also living reminder of the compromises their governments in the deportation and extermination. Moreover, the time was to celebrate the heroism of the Resistance and soldiers, not the valorization of suffering and victims. Simone Veil has demonstrated the inability of witnesses to be heard, to as it was difficult to face the unimaginable atrocities that they made the tale. Even in Israel , as determined by the historian Tom Segev (The Seventh Million, 1993), survivors of the genocide were often suspected of collaborating to survive, they found themselves accused of having gone to the camps "like sheep to slaughter "or not to have emigrated to Palestine before the war. The Jewish state, founded upon 1953 of Yad Vashem , focused primarily on the celebration of the few heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising , rather than insisting on the masses of women, children or old people murdered. Until the rediscovery of the Holocaust in the West in the 1970's , many survivors have therefore preferred to remain silent, often did not even open their past to their own children, friends or colleagues. More than one has been tapped by the "survivor guilt". Unable to overcome the psychological and moral of their past, some Holocaust survivors have committed suicide , becoming victims, sometimes decades later, of "deferred assassination" (Franois Bedarida). Among the best known are the poet Paul Celan , writer Primo Levi , or the mother of cartoonist Art Spiegelman. However, there is no evidence that suicide was particularly prevalent among survivors of the Holocaust. The duty of memory developed in the West since the 1970s , in reaction to the threat of denial has often led to many former prisoners to break their silence and to testify before the media, in schools and colleges, or by writing their memories. Some returned regularly to the scene of the massacre as guides to accompany groups of visitors, especially young people, including Auschwitz. This place has been crucial and symbolic and 25 million visitors since 1945. The Holocaust is a crime all the more bewildering and traumatic it was perpetrated at the instigation of one of the most modern countries in the world, famous for its scientific and technical achievements and for its abundance of artists, philosophers and writers. The cultural and intellectual level of many participants lack emotional also hit posterity. The executioners of the Holocaust have become the symbol of the failure of culture to prevent the horror, and questioning the very idea of civilization. Furthermore, no Nazi torturer has been forced to participate in the Holocaust. Einsatzgruppen soldier or camp guard whose nerves were cracking was persuaded to continue, or he easily obtained his transfer. In case of trial after the war, while seeking to minimize his role, none has denied the reality of the extermination. Almost none either never made note of regret or repentance. In all the countries of Europe, he also found institutions, groups or individuals to relay Nazi initiatives and facilitating the performance of the genocide. Still others helped their silence, their passivity or their indifference and their refusal to know. The mass shootings are nervously trying to men who eventually cracked by getting drunk or become dangerous to their own accomplices. The use of gas vans and gas chambers is to put between executioners and victims a sufficient distance to allow the former to continue their work more quietly to the end. At Auschwitz , the division of tasks dilutes the sense of individual responsibility, since each is only part of the entire process of extermination - which solely responsible for the selection, which lead the victim to gas, which provide the deadly poison or pouring. The official language of euphemisms ("special treatment" for gassing, "evacuation" for deportation) also allow a little more criminals do not watch their actions in the face. As recalled by the character of Max Aue in The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell , many of the torturers have no raw uncultivated. The heads of the Einsatzgruppen (1 000 men each on average) have in their ranks many intellectuals or lawyers. Otto Ohlendorf was a doctor of history and law graduate of three universities. Un commandant du bataillon C , Ernst Biberstein, est un thologien protestant. La plupart des mdecins de la mort nazis, l'instar de Josef Mengele , sont des praticiens trs diplms et respects dans leur ordre. Beaucoup de SS en poste dans les camps se montrent des amateurs raffins de musique ou de peinture. Mais beaucoup ont aussi profit de la pleine licence que l'autorit leur donnait d'humilier et de tuer les Juifs pour donner libre cours leur sadisme et leur sauvagerie tout en s'enrichissant personnellement sans vergogne de leurs dpouilles matrielles. Qu'il s'agisse de SS, de policiers, de soldats ordinaires , de collaborationnistes ou encore de kapo des camps recruts parmi les criminels de droit commun, d'innombrables photos ou rcits dmontrent le plaisir souvent pris faire souffrir leurs victimes par les humiliations les plus perverses, ou en imaginant les supplices les plus cruels. Couper en public la barbe des vieux Juifs religieux, les forcer des danses grotesques et puisantes avant de les abattre, prolonger ou aggraver dlibrment la souffrance et l'agonie de victimes, poser hilare avec le dernier Juif vivant de telle ville nettoye avant d'envoyer la photo sa famille en Allemagne comme une curiosit, sont ainsi pendant la Shoah des pratiques courantes parmi bien d'autres. In the concentration camps , commanders and guards engaged in daily practices and free no less barbaric. Thus, letting the police dogs on detainees (at Sobibor , Sergeant Paul Grot SS stands even his dog to tear the testicles of his victims when he heard shouting: "Jude . More than a hangman also proved capable of occasionally unexpected tenderness, a gesture of help or leniency or moderation saver (temporarily) lives. The commandant Rudolf Hss describes in his memoirs that for the fulfillment of the task entrusted by the Fhrer, he had to repress his sensitivity, present in spite of himself a straight face and give an example of callousness to all subordinates Germans and Austrians "ordinary" Surveys of European and American historians have shown the many other existing complicity in German society for the implementation of the Holocaust. Christopher Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has such analyzed the behavior of police battalions composed of "ordinary men" sent to Poland and behave executioners conscientious, zealous and sometimes, during the massacres and deportations. Daniel J. Goldhagen concludes that Germans were "Hitler's Willing Executioners (title of his book ). This thesis has been criticized by other historians, especially for its lack of nuance, because it shows the failure to put on the same footing "ordinary anti-Semitism" and the manipulations that make the "radical anti-Semitic." Discussions also focus on the role of ordinary Germans. Gradually as one approaches the front, the involvement of society is undeniable. The Wehrmacht and police occupation zones participated in the Holocaust. Without the help of the army, 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen could not kill a million men. Many soldiers came to watch the executions voyeurs and have even participated . Many Germans were more or less aware of the atrocities that Jews suffered. Soldiers from Eastern Front reported stories of killings of the Einsatzgruppen in their leaves into the Reich. In the last part of the war, rumors about the gassing of Jews were circulating. The general attitude has been the withdrawal and the desire not to know what was behind the rumors . The Austrians took part in the genocide in still greater proportion than the Germans, and may have killed more Jews than the latter. Among the Nazi leaders, in addition to Hitler himself, include Eichmann , Kaltenbrunner , Seyss-Inquart. The Austrians have provided one third of the Einsatzgruppen killers, about 40% of the concentration camp guards, commanders of four of the six extermination camps, or commanders, or chiefs of the Gestapo as the Netherlands (Hans Rautter ) Poland (Grabner) , . It is an Austrian officer, Karl Silberbauer , who arrested the four in August 1944 Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam. It does not pose less after the war "first victim of Nazism, Austria permanently deny any responsibility and any compensation to Jewish victims. Even without being anti-Semitic, many Europeans occupied countries took part in the Final Solution in executing the orders of government officials or conscientious zeal without spiritual states. Across Europe, countless politicians, bureaucrats and policemen at one time or another from time to time saved Jews spoke in favor or some of them, which does not prevent them for as many continue to participate in the final solution. As the Allies approached, it became commonplace, especially among the opportunists and careerists , for "his" Jews to shirk in future treatment procedures. According to Raul Hilberg , save a few Jews with one hand while contributing to the deaths of many others also permitted "murderers office" to keep a clear conscience and to continue their work. Without personally commit atrocities or murders, and without necessarily being anti-Semitic nor necessarily adhere to Nazi ideology, many politicians, bureaucrats and officials of the Reich and state employees have made the machinery of the Final Solution. They have acted with varying degrees of zeal by the people, places and moments. They may have various reasons, and belief of the Vichy regime that was absolutely necessary to maintain the illusion of French sovereignty by making himself the arrests and the illusion that by going through the good front of German intentions, there would be a choice place for France in the new Nazi Europe. For years Western historians have blamed the Nazi crimes to the small group of leaders of the Reich. In 1950 , only historiography Marxist raised the issue of liability of the German people in the implementation of Nazi violence. She pointed the finger at the role of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie of the industrial, but did not extend beyond the responsibilities of this circle. From the 1960s , the historical school " functionalist ", mainly German, shows that the issues raised by the origin of the Holocaust are very complex. Another current historiographical appointed intentionalist , blame them for doing so dilute the responsibilities in the organization and implementation of the Shoah . According to the functionalist, then, the genocide was the result of a decision process and organizational spread over time, between summer 1941 and autumn 1942, in which Hitler was content to give vague guidelines . Their work shows that a large number of players took part in the Holocaust, and they renewed the search by generating new studies. Ian Kershaw explains in his book, Hitler, the Fhrer has always been central to the decisions, even if he did not give all the orders himself. Gothenburg Aly describes how the genocide of the years 1939-1941. They show that not only SS but also the Gauleiter or experts in Berlin, played a role in the movement and the massacre of Jewish populations. Other historians link local initiatives like those that were taken in Poland in 1941. They provide insight into the importance of "testing" methods of murder on the ground. By cons, they default to suggest that senior leaders of the Third Reich Himmler , Heydrich , and Hitler was not indispensable to the process of genocide. However, we must not forget that Hitler was a master at the other end of the process. It suggests more than it tells but part of its methods. Saul Friedlnder insists on this point. He said that when Germany invaded the USSR, Goebbels and Heydrich wonder if the Russian Jews must wear yellow stars. They will see Gring : "Too large, will talk to Hitler. He receives all the figures on the number of murdered Jews. After Stalingrad , he insists with Goebbels to return to the centrality of the Jewish question . Moreover, the intent to kill is present from the beginning of the war. Even projects with deportation in the region of Lublin , in Madagascar or Siberia have resulted in the deaths of millions of Jews. Finally the implementation of the Holocaust is characterized by numerous exchanges between Berlin and local officials. The sum of local initiatives have not led to the Holocaust without coordination at the top of men like Gring, Himmler, Heydrich and of course Hitler . The suicide of Hitler on 30 April 1945 and that of Himmler May 23 deprived the Nuremberg tribunal for the appearance of the two main perpetrators of the Holocaust. Number of criminals of all ranks have also escaped justice in giving death, like the May 1 of Goebbels , instigator of anti-Semitic propaganda, the Crystal Night and the deportation of Jews from his stronghold Berlin. Were killed in 1945 as the top leader SS Odilo Globocnik , or the organizer of the deportations from France and several other countries Theodor Dannecker. Other master-pieces of foreground were killed during the war resisters, and Heydrich in Prague in May 1942. In the Balkans, supporters also killed the former commander of Belzec Christian Wirth. Others have literally disappeared in the storm. Martin Bormann perished for example, probably the 1 May 1945 during the Battle of Berlin , as the head of the Gestapo in Germany Hermann Mller. The Allies had once warned that the 1941-1942 war criminals would be prosecuted and punished. From 1943-1944, as the release of the USSR, the Soviets launched extensive investigations. They judged and condemned the Germans responsible for massacres and many of their local accomplices. The purges in different countries have released some of the judge responsible for the Final Solution, although the specific nature and extent of it still remained unclear to contemporaries, and even if the deportation of Jews did not constitute A central problem for the prosecution or for the opinion. Some criminals who have plagued several countries, however, were judged by a particular state. Slovaks undertook such death sentence Dieter Wisliceny , one of Eichmann's right arm. The 16 major Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg were the answer including heads of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Holocaust has been amply discussed by the judges, victims and executioners to witness cited, including Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess , the head of mobile killing units Otto Ohlendorf or SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. It not only occupied a central place, and no Jew was called as a witness by example. A series of other trials, always in Nuremberg, visas between 1946 and 1951 the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen , industry responsible for exploiting labor concentration camps, Nazi doctors or criminals. Allied military courts judged as dozens of guards and some commanders of concentration camps, in trials such as Dachau , Buchenwald and Ravensbrck. The first and main Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoess , ruled by the Poles, was executed in 1947 on the place of his crimes. His successor less extremist, Arthur Liebehenschel , suffered the same fate. The third and last commander, Richard Baer , was not found until late, and died in prison in 1963 before his trial. In the 1960s, West Germany ruled in turn, in three trials held in Frankfurt , several former guards of the most important place of genocide. But in 7000 guards SS went through Auschwitz, only 10% were found and tried. Criminals will be hunted down fugitive Nazis and recovered. The former commander of Treblinka , Franz Stangl , and was extradited from Brazil and died in prison in Dusseldorf in 1971 . Adolf Eichmann , organizer of the deportations, was kidnapped by the Mossad in Argentina and tried in Jerusalem by the Supreme Court the State of Israel. Her sensational trial in 1961 marked the beginning of the revival of the memory of the Holocaust. For the first time in history, moreover, it was reported before a Jewish court of "crimes against the Jewish people." Perfectly regular (Israel went up to pay for the German lawyer of Eichmann, after allowing him to enroll at exceptionally State Bar Hebrew), the trial was marked by the presentation of damning documents abundant and the testimony of many survivors. Sentenced to death and hanged in 1962 , Eichmann seemed a dull and ordinary man, incapable of the slightest regret or to make any comment morality on his actions. He presented himself as a bureaucrat meticulous and conscientious, concerned only the technical aspect of his task. His attitude inspired Hannah Arendt's famous reflections on the "banality of evil." Many performers of the Holocaust were never worried, and made successful careers of administrative, political or economic FRG and GDR. Or, they saw the charges against them dropped over time, unless to get away with light sentences and late. Many others died after taking refuge in free Latin America (including Josef Mengele , the "doctor death" of Auschwitz) or in the Arab world , for example Alois Brunner. Pathways linked to personalities Vatican helped some criminals to escape mass, such as the bloodthirsty dictator Croatian Ante Pavelic , while with the Cold War , Soviets and Americans slowed proceedings and recyclrent number of former Nazis in Europe or their secret services. Klaus Barbie , a senior leader of the Gestapo in Lyon, and entered the service of the CIA and was able to flee to Bolivia and finally extradited in 1983 , he was tried in Lyon in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, particularly the stalk of the 44 orphans of Izieu. The limitation for crimes against humanity (eg integrated into French law in 1964 ), the awakening of the memory of the Holocaust and tenacious action "Nazi hunters" like Simon Wiesenthal or Serge Klarsfeld allowed in the year 1980 - 1,990 to hold a new round of lawsuits. In particular, Rene Bousquet , former police chief of the Vichy government and responsible for the majority of deportations from France, was shot by a deranged man in 1993 on the eve of trial. His deputy John Leguay died before trial. The policeman Paul Touvier in 1994 and former senior official Maurice Papon in 1998 were the first French specifically condemned for complicity in crimes against humanity. "How can an entire nation being wiped out he could suffer the same fate? How the world could he let such a monstrosity accomplished without trying to intervene to stop or at least slow it down? How Christian Europe did she perish the people of Israel when it has not itself contributed to their massacre? . The Catholic historian and former resistance Franois Bedarida summed up the agonizing questions posed to humanity by the Shoah . In general, "except in the minds of a few senior Nazis, Jews were not at stake in the Second World War "(Tony Judt) . In the 1930s , most Western countries closed their borders to victims of anti-Semitic persecution in Germany and Central Europe. From 1939 to 1940, many Austrian and German Jews refugees have been detained as "enemy aliens" by Britain and France. Lest the Arab world and its oil resources should join the side of the Third Reich , the British close the Palestine to Jewish emigration, and renew its drastic limitation of the White Paper of 1939, to maintain without interruption during the war and until 1948. In 1939, a ship loaded with refugees left in Europe, St. Louis, is repressed by the United States and several Caribbean states in the area before having to leave for the Netherlands. Passengers will be surprised by the German invasion in May 1940 and three quarters of them exterminated. The conference in Evian on Refugees, held from 6 to 15 July 1938 , was the most pathetic public demonstration of general refusal to welcome Jews. The USSR, Fascist Italy and Czechoslovakia did not even send a representative. Observers appointed by Hungary, Poland and Romania just want to know if we could help them get rid of their Jews. Other countries do not want any more refugees. This is the time when Canada said no refugees would be too ("None is Too Many"), where the United States and Latin America still recovering from the Great Depression further restrict entries. The Swiss , judging by the mouth of a federal adviser that "the boat is full" ("Das Boot ist voll"), is negotiating with the Nazis to force the refugees to its territory: the Confederation calls itself in Berlin, and obtained in October 1938 , the passports of German Jews were expelled by the letter J in indelible red ink . Assured that the stranger will do no help to the Jews, Hitler can strengthen its racist policy and, in parallel to the success of Munich, the launch Kristallnacht , and the genocide itself. Brave men have braved all difficulties to try to prevent the Allies. Thus the Christian resistant Kurt Gerstein , who joined the SS to fight from within, trying to alert the world in the summer of 1942, the gassings he saw in person at Belzec , and who committed suicide in 1945. And Jan Karski , a delegate to London by the Polish resistance. From Switzerland, Riegner telegram of 8 August 1942 London and Washington to inform the Final Solution in progress. Generally, this information has been little or no flood, and did not elicit any particular response of governments and opinion in allied countries. Even Jewish organizations have refused to believe the figures and their descriptions were made of the Nazi death machine . Samuel Zygelbojm , representative of the Bund from the Polish government in exile in London, killed himself on 11 May 1943 : "Upon my death, I would like for the last time, to protest against the passivity of a world which attends the extermination of the Jewish people and admits. " Unbelief could be explained by the memory of the excesses of propaganda and "brainwashing" in the Great War. Beyond that, she was encouraged by the absence of previous comparable and character unheard and unthinkable crime. Information about the extermination of Jews circulated as early as 1941 and especially 1942 to the BBC , in the Anglo-Saxon and even in some of the underground press of occupied countries. But they mingled with no specific treatment for other stories of atrocities and the mention of other issues and problems . The Allies did not always aware of the specificity of the fate that befell the Jewish people. They therefore do not want to give the impression that they favored a category of victim in relation to another. Winston Churchill , whose services could decipher coded German messages thanks to Enigma , knew from the summer of 1941 that the Einsatzgruppen systematically massacring Soviet Jews, but in his public speeches, he denounced the horrors without ever mentioning the Jewish character of the victims. The Anglo-Saxons, not to mention the Soviets did not want to give the impression that they were fighting for the Jews, for fear of reactions including anti-Semitic part of their population. In the USSR, traditional anti-Semitism and the revival of nationalism or even chauvinism led the fight against Germany left little room for specific mention of the fate of the Jews. United States, an outbreak of anti-Semitism in public opinion (some taxing the New Deal of Roosevelt of Jew Deal). But more generally, it is also that the attention of people, tied to survive or win the war, was unwilling to give priority to the fate of a minority (1% of the population of France, 10% of that of Poland). "Except in the minds of a few senior Nazis, Jews n ' From massacre to genocide in Eastern Europe (Fall 1941)
The Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942)
Main roundups and death trains
Action Reinhardt: the liquidation of Jews by gassing of Poland (1942-1943)
The centrality of Auschwitz-Birkenau (1942-1944)
The destruction of the Jews of Hungary (1944)
The extermination by forced labor
The death marches (1945)
Three cases
Serbia
Croatia
Romania
The massacres of Odessa
Transnistria, a region for the extermination
The behavior of Jews during the Holocaust
Living and dying at the time of the disaster
During the "Holocaust by bullets"
Now these Jews were not informed about what was happening to Jews in occupied Europe. They therefore do not know what dangers threaten them . The controversial role of the Jewish Councils
Jews in the Resistance, Jewish resistance and armed revolts
The fate of survivors after 1945
The "massacre of the survivors in Eastern Europe
Emigration outside Europe
Trauma, silences and Evidence
Executioners, bureaucrats and accomplices
Torturers: identity and attitudes
Officials and "criminals of office"
Pogroms and informers
The debate about the responsibilities
Stalk, leaks and trial of those responsible for the extermination
Attitude of the outside world
The pre-war borders closed and turned back refugees
Allies and the Final Solution
In December 1942 , almost all the Allied governments made a solemn joint declaration against the massacre of Jews in Europe, and officials warn that they will be prosecuted. Less explicitly, Pope Pius XII denounced in his Christmas radio message of the death of innocent people who were doomed to death because of their race alone. But in 1943-1944, these statements are much more rare or nonexistent, while the extermination continued in full swing.
First absorbed by the pursuit of military objectives, the Allies seem to have thought that the rapid end of the war was the best way to stop the persecution, without grasping that the pace of industrial slaughter might leave only few Jews alive to victory. In 1944, at the height of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, Churchill was in favor of a bombing on the rails and the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but wants to first consult with the Americans: the project is easily blocked at a level less government, without even reaching Roosevelt. The bombing of Auschwitz could have or not to change anything to the victims, the fact is that its intrinsic moral issue has not been seen or broken the silence of the Allies .
Overall, passivity and indifference prevailed, without awareness of the exceptional gravity of the crime in progress.
From 19 to 30 April 1943 , so the conference held in Bermuda on possible assistance to the Jews of Europe took place far from everything and everyone, without any Jewish organization is represented, or the speakers no power decision but just a recommendation. It sticks to the lyrics. The State Department U.S., led by Cordell Hull , proved particularly damning of passivity, while the official and unofficial reports reaching him since 1942.
Minister Henry Morgenthau, himself of Jewish origin does not dare speak a long time for Europe's Jews for fear of being accused of bias. But it was his explosive report in January 1944 against the inaction of the State Department is reacting late Roosevelt on 22 January 1944 , Bush founded the War Refugee Board (Refugee Office of War), directed by John Pehle. In 18 months, the WRB will save tens of thousands of people. His envoy to Romania, Ira Hirschmann, managed to free the 48,000 surviving Jews of Transnistria and have them leave for Turkey. Iver Olsen from Sweden ft save many survivors of the Baltic countries and dispatches to Budapest Raoul Wallenberg. It remains open to question how many other people could have been saved if awareness and willingness to act had occurred earlier .
Churches and the Vatican of Pope Pius XII
Christians have been one of the leading groups providing Righteous Among the Nations. But institutionally, the attitude of the Churches of Europe faced the Holocaust was contrasted by country, men and dignitaries.
National churches have strongly protested against such as the persecution of Jews and the Lutheran state church in Norway, whose bishops collectively resign in 1942 by rejecting the government collaborator Quisling , or hierarchies of the Catholic and Protestant Netherlands in July 1942.
In France's Vichy regime , the loyalty of the episcopate against the reactionary regime of Marshal Petain has silenced many languages. Only five bishops over a hundred have publicly protested against the raids of the summer 1942, including the Archbishop of Marseille Delay Bishop, the Cardinal Gerlier , Primate of Gaul, Lyon, Bishop Moussaron in Albi, Mgr Pierre-Marie Theas of Montauban, and especially Bishop Julius Salige in Toulouse. However, fear of conflict with the Church played its part in the decision of Pierre Laval to reduce the deportations from the fall of 1942 .
In the Reich, where the Concordat of 1933, in wartime patriotism and respect for the established link hands with the national episcopate, the same people who had condemned from the pulpit the extermination of mentally ill people, the Clement picture of Bishop von Galen, did not have a word publicly about the fate of the Jews. Priests, pastors or bishops who were involved in the rescue of Jews in the Resistance or have generally made their own initiative and without any encouragement from their superiors.
Pope Pius XII was probably the best head of state informed about the genocide, due to information which could go back to Rome from many parishes and dioceses all over Europe. Its official silence him, however, was much criticized, especially from the 1960s. .
Neutral countries
L' Espagne du dictateur Franco , alli non-belligrant de Hitler, a tantt accept tantt refoul les rfugis juifs. En 1926 , le dictateur a href = "Miguel_Primo_de_Rivera" alt = "Miguel Primo de Rivera"> Primo de Rivera had annulled the expulsion decree of 1492 led to the Diaspora Sephardic , and returned Spanish nationality to the descendants who requested it, provided they do not return to live in the peninsula. This provision has enabled some Sephardim occupied countries to survive the Holocaust. Furthermore, Spanish diplomats and consuls have occasionally helped the descendants of Jews from Spain where they were stationed, even if no order has ever been given them in this direction from Madrid. Many Spaniards do not realize that many refugees over the Pyrenees were Jews. The number of Jews who escaped the genocide through Spain in 1940 is estimated between 20 000 and 35 000 , which just before the 7000 war, and he repressed during the war those who sought help at home, including non-Jews with their children - thus parents Saul Friedlnder were turned back at the summer 1942: fallen into the hands of the Vichy government , they perished deported in October. Accepted Jewish refugees were not allowed to work and had to live on the special taxes levied by the Confederation on its rich Jewish residents. She drove in 20 000 .
By cons, Carl Lutz , a Swiss diplomat freed 50,000 immigration certificates to save 50,000 Jews under Swiss protection in Budapest .
The country's banks have also sheltered and recycled knowingly looted gold to the Jews deported, thus contributing substantially to finance the German war effort. Contrary to legend, no train of deportees has transited through Switzerland .
The Sweden has welcomed thousands of Jewish refugees and resistance, including the entire Danish community evacuated in September 1943 , and several hundred Norwegian Jews . However, his Social Democratic government has continued to provide throughout the Reich in iron ore.
The Turkey has never had a history of persecution of Jews as Jews , and it will be one of the few Muslim countries to recognize Israel since its foundation. If thousands of Jews found refuge in Turkey before and during the war - particularly academics and artists who participated in a decisive way to the modernization of Turkey - and if thousands more have immigrated illegally in Palestine (the figures vary from 12 000 to 100 000 ), through joint action by the Turkish authorities and the Zionist organizations, some episodes have given different interpretations and controversies. In February 1942, the 769 passengers of the Romanian Struma , who hoped to move to Palestine, drowned in the Black Sea during the accidental sinking of their ship by a Soviet submarine, and some historians blame the British authorities as that Turkish , others, mainly on the British .
The Turkish consul in Rhodes , Selahattin lkmen (1914-2003), was made Righteous Among the Nations . Foundation Raoul Wallenberg worked since 2008 for recognition of other Turkish diplomats, including Behi Erkin, ambassador to Paris and Necdet Kent, Consul General in Marseille .
On 11 November 1942, the Turkish Grand National Assembly voted to create a tax on capital given the magnitude of the fraud, inspectors arbitrarily reevaluated the amount to be collected, so higher for non-Muslims as others, and used coercive imprisonment in 1943. On 15 March 1944, this tax was repealed, the amounts still owed canceled and the last taxpayers incarcerated released .
The Jewish communities of America and Palestine
In March 1943 , Stephen Wise , a personal friend of President Roosevelt that periodically tries to warn about the fate of the Jews, 75,000 protesters gather at Madison Square Garden in New York against the ongoing slaughter. But this kind of demonstration is exceptional during the war. Overall, the American Jewish community has deemed so powerful that just pushed his government to act on behalf of fellow Jews in Europe, for fear of fostering a surge of anti-Semitism in the United States . One of the latest messages from insurgent Warsaw ghetto in April 1943 , addressed to the Jews of America to lament the silence and passivity which they showed at the time of the death of their brethren in Europe.
In his book The Seventh Million, published in 1993 in Israel, the historian Tom Segev has shown that the leaders of Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) and the future founders of Israel , the fate of European Jewry had formed during the war a secondary problem. The future founders of Israel, beginning with David Ben Gurion , were more concerned with preparing for post-war and the creation of the Jewish state, and moreover felt powerless to change the situation in Europe. In 1944, the World Jewish Congress has called for bombing the gas chambers and rails leading to Auschwitz, but rather weakly, Chaim Weizmann is showing favor to the request but not insist, and Ben Gurion hostile.
Rescue and Righteous Gentiles
The tragedy of the Jews was generally proportional to their degree of isolation in society.
The people facing the Holocaust
In the East, they more they almost all perished were abandoned, ignored or despised by people largely anti-Semitic. Moreover, they were subject themselves to a permanent mass terror that threatened immediate death anyone who commits a gesture of compassion and his own family. Poles or Ukrainians were brutally tortured in public for giving a piece of bread or an asylum to Jews, whole families hanged, shot or deported for being here to help. But despite the contentious anti-Semitic and Nazi terror, Poland also has over 5000 Righteous Gentiles recognized at this time by Yad Vashem , the highest number in Europe.
In Germany, the denials of post-war ("We did not know") does not cover the historical reality of the front letters, diaries, police reports (not to mention the show in 1945 the death marches), allow establish that between half and two thirds of the adult population of the Reich knew that Jews were not only deported but exterminated, even if the precise modalities of the killing were rarely known, and though many have preferred to look away out of indifference, out of fear, conformity, by disbelief or interest .
The German resistance to Nazism was not always perceived anti-Semitism as a central issue, and some of the conspirators of 20 July 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler remained convinced of the existence of a "Jewish question" or even the need for legislation restricting the "Jewish influence". But the program of the plotters planned explicitly stop the persecution and the return of stolen property, and the failed attempt to overthrow Hitler has prevented the immediate cessation of the Holocaust.
In the Reich, individualities were courageous compassion, as Monsignor Lichtenberg , deported to death praying for Jews in Berlin. In 1943, the Rosenstrasse in Berlin, the spouses of Jews show successfully for the release of their husbands, however, remained an exceptional episode. Despite the risks and totalitarian surveillance of the Gestapo , a few thousand Jews managed to survive illegally in the German cities until the end (known as the U-Boat or "submarine") with the help of German "Aryan" dedicated.
In the Netherlands, a country without anti-Semitic tradition, a general strike paralyzes solidarity Amsterdam for several days when in February 1941 , the Germans deported 365 Jews to Mauthausen and Buchenwald . The first strike against racism of the History fails to rescue the victims, but manifest a collective refusal to persecution uncommon in the Europe of the time. The local resistance and many people come to the aid of the Israelites, but not preventing the death of 80% of the community.
Contrary to popular belief, this record of failure is not due to the lack of mountains and forests to hide the persecuted Dutch . Indeed, hundreds of thousands of resistant, resistant to STO and Jews have managed to hide in cities until 1945. The problem is mostly held in the traditional division of Dutch society in political and religious communities highly compartmentalized (the "pillarisation", that is to say the pillars ): without sufficient relationships outside their own community, ghettoized and annihilated the Dutch Jews could not hope to find salvation outside help.
In France and Belgium, the implementation of the Holocaust takes on a highly xenophobic , as the Vichy regime brings with its police in the deportation of foreign Jews, believing wrongly that the German and French Jews will save (even though they had never received any promise even that word in this sense). In Belgium, where the vast majority of Jews did not have Belgian nationality, the Germans have the ability to exempt Jews from Belgium early deportations . Thus, the administration did not protest, and the only late interventions, such as the Queen Mother Elizabeth , will only affect the Belgian Jews. 44% of Jews find the kingdom of death.
However, Belgium has also over 1500 Fair. And in the Hexagon , the mobilization of many strangers, men of the church, monasteries, structures of resistance and solidarity networks (like the relative indifference of the Germans for France as a country of deportation) has allowed three quarters of the Jews of France to see the end of the war, a figure outstanding in the West.
The rescue group: Bulgaria and Denmark
In Bulgaria in March 1943 , a vast movement of public opinion forces the king and Parliament to back down and refuse to deliver the national Jews to the Nazis. Despite the presence of the Wehrmacht on the ground of its ally, the entire Bulgarian community survives the war. However, Sofia agrees to arrest and deport more than 13,000 Jews from Thrace and Macedonia occupied by his troops.
In Denmark , King Christian X threatens to himself the yellow star if the Germans want to impose. In September 1943 , when voluntary indiscretion of a German diplomat made the project known deportation of some 7,000 Jews, the population is mobilized to move the community in Sweden neutral through the Strait of Copenhagen. On several nights, with the benevolence of the police and administration, a fleet of small vessels leads to a successful chain of complicity that those allowed to send secretly to the dock.
Allies and Hitler's reluctance compromises between
The Finland , following the scandal in public opinion, has finally delivered that 9 of the 34 foreign Jews expected, but only one of these nine survive.
The Japanese , who have distinguished themselves in countless war crimes in Asia, do not respond to requests for much of their ally Hitler to attack the 20 000 German Jewish refugees in Shanghai after 1933. The ideological anti-Semitism of the Nazis they still incomprehensible, and the Fugu Plan , they try instead to use these often highly skilled refugees to highlight the Manchuria occupied.
Other allies of Hitler stopped mid-way through their active participation in the Holocaust.
In Hungary, although subjected to anti-Semitic legislation since the inter-war years, the Hungarian Jews are not delivered for deportation as the Wehrmacht did not invade the country in March 1944. Admiral Horthy opposes new deportations, which are suspended in July but will return in the fall when he was ousted by the Nazis for the benefit of the collaborationist fascists, the Arrow Cross. Romania, which has killed more than 200,000 Jews from its borders, has refused to hand over its Jewish nationals, who survived. State anti-Semitic, Slovakia Monsignor Tiso , satellite Reich, first delivered by tens of thousands of its nationals Jews in early 1942, before changing his mind, especially under pressure from the Vatican, and suspend deportations. After the crash of the Slovak National Uprising of August 1944 , the Nazis and the collaborationist resume deportations racist.
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The Fascist Italy of Mussolini, it is usually rewarded for protecting the Jews in their occupation zones. Thus, in seven French departments occupied by the Italian army between November 1942 and 8 September 1943 , the military administration has refused any deportation and did not hesitate to call to order the authorities of the Vichy regime when they were attacking the Israelites. As a result, many Jews of France flocked to the Italian zone, where raids and deportations begin, however, in their turn with the arrival of the Germans.
However, recent historiography has heavily nuanced representation of fascism protector of Jews. As she has demonstrated, Mussolini had become personally anti-Semitic and racist at the time of the conquest of Ethiopia ( 1935 - 1936 ) and then with the radicalization of his regime in a way totalitarian , in the late 1930's. Thus, the anti-Jewish laws introduced in Italy in 1938 are not due to a desire to imitate Hitler's ally, and meet a real conversion to anti-Semitism of the regime. Applied more than what we have long believed, they have weakened the Italian Jews and prepared some of the ground to the Germans. They were even more serious that Italy had no tradition of anti-Semitic and that Jews have traditionally been numerous and well accepted in the military, in government or in the fascist movement itself.
On the other hand, the refusal of Italian Jews must deliver much more to a desire to seize the opportunity to show the Germans that they were masters in their areas themselves than any sympathy for the Jews, according to historians. No instructions to protect the Jews was never given by the government of Rome, and it even happened that Italian troops engaged in some places of the Jews to the Nazis and during the deportation of Jews from Tirana in Albania.
After the invasion of Italy in September 1943 , very violent fascist militias of the Republic of Salo actively cooperate in hunting down and killing Jews. Nearly 9,000 Italian Jews were deported.
Dedication individual and organized
Awarded by Yad Vashem , the title of " Righteous Among the Nations "honor non-Jews who saved Jews from the Holocaust to disinterested motives.
Are not discussed here those who sold false documents to Jews sometimes with gold, or have passed in Spain or in Switzerland cons of money - some unscrupulous selling even after customers from the Nazis having received the payment; most smugglers and brave volunteers have offered their help to risk their lives or their freedom.
In Marseille, the American Varian Fry in 1940 managed to bring more than 2000 intellectuals and artists in Europe including many Jews. In 1944 in Budapest , the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved more than 20,000 Hungarian Jews, including distributing passports of convenience.
Religious institutions are over-represented in helping Jews, often hidden in monasteries or religious boarding. False certificates of baptism have been issued by numerous priests and pastors. Despite their sympathy Petain , a large number of French bishops have been giving refuge to Jews. In Rome, the official silence of Pope Pius XII did not prevent religious institutions linked to the Vatican to house and save thousands of persecuted. Other faith-based organizations were closer to the spiritual strength. So many children rounded up in Lyon have they been released in a night camp in Villeurbanne ( 28 August 1942 ) by Christian Friendship of the Abbe Glasberg and RP Pierre Chaillet , founder of Christian Witness.
Whole villages are sometimes came to the rescue of persecuted Protestants as the villages of Nieuwlande the Netherlands, of Dieulefit in the Drome and Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Haute-Loire, the latter being collectively known as Just. Minority once persecuted by the royal power, the French Protestants were particularly likely to be devoted to new outlaws.
Officials, policemen, soldiers, companies have refused to participate in the persecution, plunder or deportation. Some police officers escaped from the prefecture where they were recorded and managed to alert rescue Jews in Paris on the eve of the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv '. Officials at the prefecture, 18 July 1942 , saved almost all of the hundreds of Jews targeted by the raid missed Nancy. Oskar Schindler , German employer of forced labor Jewish Krakow , save 1200 of them to death when he realized the fate reserved for them.
Especially in the West, many Europeans came to the aid of Jews as a class of pariahs among others, unaware of their own specific fate that awaited report by the prisoners escaped, with resistant or refractory to the STO. Even when they were saving people from extermination, some individuals and movements have been particularly aware at the time of actual projects of Hitler and the centrality of racism and antisemitism in Nazi ideology.
Balance
Culture
The Holocaust is, among other things, a cultural annihilation. Yiddishland of the Central and Eastern Europe has virtually disappeared, and it is estimated that three quarters of the speakers of Yiddish who disappeared during the war.
France lost a quarter of its Jewish population, even if the French Jewish world as such continues to exist (synagogues and Jewish schools have even remained open in Paris throughout the Occupation), however, Jewish communities Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Vilnius have been eradicated more than 80 or 90%. In Vilnius, 32 000 Jews who were murdered during the pogroms at the beginning of the conflict . The Nazis also sought to erase all traces of the Jewish past centuries in robbing their victims of all their property and works of art, destroying the synagogues, burning prayer books, turning cemeteries.
This is not the Jewish people who lost many of her children, but the few survivors who have lost their people and their world, no way back . . "
Assessments casualty figures
Estimates of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust for specialists vary between 5.1 million (the historian Raul Hilberg) and 6 million (the economist and statistician Jacob Lestchinsky). We are talking about 6 million victims in reference to the figure quoted from the Nuremberg trials , justified in the Breviary of Hatred of Leon Poliakov and resumed the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Yad Vashem has been able to find the name of a little over 4 million of them , according to its own estimates.
At the end of his book The Destruction of European Jews, Raul Hilberg attempts to quantify the overall casualties. He divides the figures into three categories :
- Dead consecutive deprivation, in particular, hunger and disease in the ghettos.
- Died by gunfire.
- Consecutive deaths in deportations to extermination camps.
The estimates come from reports from services including German authorities satellites and Jewish councils. They were then refined using the statistical comparisons between pre-war and those of post-war. Hilberg strives to make corrections to take into account not only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and exclude those whose deaths can be attributed to the war.
This dissociation is often difficult. Thus, when Germany invaded the USSR, a million and half Jews leave their homes, just as a larger number of non-Jews among whom mortality is higher than normal. Another problem in estimating the number of victims is the fact that 70% of the victims are from Poland and the USSR and the borders of both countries continue to evolve throughout the war so statistics of the Nazi bureaucracy often refer to territories whose borders are fluid .
In summary, the magnitude of the genocide itself, the circumstances of the persecution and war, the very ambiguity of the quality of a Jew , it is impossible to quantify precisely the number of victims, much less to categorize: Hilberg gives finally the estimate of 5.1 million Jewish victims.
Victims by Country
The figures in the table of Lucy Dawidowicz showing the number of casualties compared to the pre-war population of each country, and the percentage of deaths by country:
| Country | Estimated Jewish population before war | Jewish population exterminated | Percentage of fatalities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poland | 3,300,000 | 3,000,000 | 90 |
| Baltic States | 253,000 | 228,000 | 90 |
| Germany and Austria | 240,000 | 210,000 | 90 |
| Bohemia & Moravia | 90,000 | 80,000 | 89 |
| Slovakia | 90,000 | 75,000 | 83 |
| Greece | 70,000 | 54,000 | 77 |
| Netherlands | 140,000 | 105,000 | 75 |
| Hungary | 650,000 | 450,000 | 70 |
| BSSR | 375,000 | 245,000 | 65 |
| Ukrainian SSR | 1,500,000 | 900,000 | 60 |
| Belgium | 65,000 | 40,000 | 60 |
| Yugoslavia | 43,000 | 26,000 | 60 |
| Romania | 600,000 | 300,000 | 50 |
| Norway | 2,173 | 890 | 41 |
| France | 350,000 | 90,000 | 26 |
| Bulgaria | 64,000 | 14,000 | 22 |
| Italy | 40,000 | 8,000 | 20 |
| Luxembourg | 5,000 | 1,000 | 20 |
| RSFSR | 975,000 | 107,000 | 11 |
| Finland | 2,000 | 22 | 1 |
| Denmark | 8,000 | 52 | 0.6 <1 |
| Total | 8,861,800 | 5,933,900 | 67 |
According to Raul Hilberg According to the prewar borders of . The few percentages are taken from the site of the CCBC :
- Poland : more than 3 million (8% of survivors)
- USSR : over 700 000
- Romania : 270 000
- Czechoslovakia : 260 000
- Hungary : over 180 000
- Lithuania : up to 130 000
- Germany : 130 000
- Netherlands : more than 100,000 (25% of survivors)
- France : 75 000
- Latvia : 70 000
- Yugoslavia : 60 000
- Greece : 60 000
- Austria : over 50,000
- Belgium : 24 000
- Italy ( Rhodes included): 9000
- Estonia : 1000
- Norway : Less than 1000
- Luxembourg : less than 1 000
- Free City of Danzig : less than 1 000
Total: Approximately 5,122,000 Jews converted to Christianity are included in these figures and refugees are counted in the countries from which they were deported.
- Poland and USSR : 4565000
- Germany : 125 000
- Austria : 65 000
- Czechoslovakia (in the borders of 1937): 277 000
- Hungary (in the borders of 1942): 402 000
- France : 83 000
- Belgium : 24 000
- Luxembourg : 700
- Italy : 7500
- Netherlands : 106 000
- Norway : 760
- Romania : 40 000
- Yugoslavia : 60 000
- Greece : 65 000
Total: 5,820,960
The victims per year
- 1933 - 1940 : <100 000
- 1941 : 1,100,000
- 1942 : 2,600,000
- 1943 : 600 000
- 1944 : 600 000
- 1945 :> 100 000
Total: 5,100,000
Number of victims by Cause of Death
- Formation of ghettos and deprivation: over 800 000
- Ghettos of Eastern Europe under German occupation: over 600 000
- Theresienstadt and deprivation outside the Ghettos: 100 000
- Colonies of Transnistria (Romanian and Soviet Jews): 100 000
- Shootings open: 1 400 000
- Camps: 2900000
- Extermination camps established by Germany
- Camps established by Romania: 100 000
- Camps established by Croatia and others: less than 50 000
Total: 5.1 million, including 2.7 million in gas chambers.
Victims in France
According to figures compiled by the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France chaired by Serge Klarsfeld and published in 1985
- 75,721 Jews, including nearly 11,000 children, were deported from France in March 1942 to August 1944 , mostly to Auschwitz.
- 74 convoys have left in total towards the concentration camps or extermination, the first of Compiegne on 27 March 1942 and the last of Clermont-Ferrand on 18 August 1944.
- Nearly 90% of these 76,000 Jews were deported from France to Auschwitz. The 43 convoys deported in 1942 , have been to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1943 , over 17 convoys of deportees, 13 were bound for Auschwitz and 4 of Sobibor. In 1944 , 14 convoys were also bound for Auschwitz, but one left for Kaunas and Reval (see convoy 73 ).
- 2 566 survivors were recorded at the Liberation in 1945 , about 3% of the deportees.
- With 3000 deaths in the internment camps before deportation and executions of thousands of Jews, the record of the "final solution" in France has reached 80 000 victims.
- The nationalities most affected among the Jews deported from France were the Poles (about 26,000), French (24 000 of which over 7,000 are children born in France of foreign parents), Germans (7000), the Russians (4500), Romanians (3300), Austrians (2500), Greece (1500), Turks (1300), Hungarians (1200).
- At least 85% of Jews deported from France were arrested by French police.
Impact and Memory of the Shoah
The central importance of the Holocaust in Western memory was not acquired until its rediscovery in the 1970s , and a better understanding of its specificity . "
Impact on International Law
The Holocaust was a historic occasion because it is a leading international awareness of several important facts:
- creating an international tribunal to try Nazi crimes, which served as a model for the Tokyo Tribunal , and the International Criminal Court in The Hague ;
- the creation of the legal concept of crimes against humanity , indefeasible;
- a movement of sympathy for the creation of a Jewish state, Israel , the Middle East ;
- the proscription of anti-Semitism in the West: widespread and regarded as one opinion among others before the Holocaust, it is now a taboo in the public sphere and a misdemeanor punishable laws, as well as in some countries the negation of Judeocide ;
- creating the concept of genocide , applied retrospectively to past events ( the Armenian genocide , genocide of the Herero ) and posterior ( genocide in Rwanda , Srebrenica massacre , etc.).. This concept does not appear in the final act of the Nuremberg trials , to avoid criticism on legal non-retroactivity of criminal laws.
Repairs and legal recognition of the past
Communist countries long refused any compensation for Jewish victims, gommrent Jewish identity of victims of Nazism and admire no responsibility for their past crimes in the States. The GDR and rejected responsibility for the crime on the West German capitalists, and did not recognize the responsibility of the German people in the Holocaust until after the first free elections in 1990, just before disappearing.
After the war, the prosecutor Hesse Fritz Bauer was not sparing in his efforts to obtain justice and compensation scheme for victims of Nazi. In 1958, he managed to get a certified class action lawsuits to take place, the collection of numerous individual claims of victims will lead to trials known as "Auschwitz" in Frankfurt, the procedure began in 1963.
Bauer also founded, with Gerhard Szczesny, the Humanist Union, an organization of human rights in 1961. After the death of Bauer, the Union made a donation to finance the Prize Fritz Bauer. In addition, the Fritz Bauer Institute, was founded in 1995, a nonprofit organization devoted to civil rights, which focuses on the history and consequences of the Holocaust.
In 1970 , the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt in front of the spectacular monument to the Warsaw ghetto.
In 1995, during a trip to Israel, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands publicly evoked the plight of Jews in the country, exterminated 80%. The state had expected 1972 to agree to pay compensation to survivors .
In July 1995 , President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the responsibility of the French State in the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv 'and the deportation of Jews, citing the "unremitting debt" towards them.
From his first election in 1990, Polish President Lech Walesa visited Israel before the Knesset to denounce anti-Semitism in Poland past and present, a message confirmed in July 1991 for the anniversary of the pogrom in Kielce (July 1946). However, he does not utter a single word "Jew" during his speech at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1995. His successor, Aleksander Kwasniewski delivered in July 2001 an oration on the occasion of the anniversary of the massacre in Jedwabne in 1941, a thousand Polish Jews by their neighbors, and recognized the responsibility of Poles in the crime and performed acts of repentance. These positions are the result of intense public debate in the country, especially about the Jedwabne pogrom , development of historical research and educational associations and actions since the advent of democracy .
In 2005 , the eve of his country's entry into the European Union, President Ion Iliescu recognized that Romania participated in the Holocaust .
The reconciliation Judeo-Christian led since the inter-war and revived by the Council of Vatican II (1962-1965) (where the Holocaust remains largely rediscovered in Europe, has not been discussed) has sometimes stumbled on the question of the attitude of the Papacy and part of the clergy and the faithful during the genocide. The installation of the Auschwitz Caramel in the camp, in the 1980s , caused a decade-long controversy, the Jewish organizations denouncing an attempt to erase the Jewish character of the place in favor of a "Christianization" and a recovery of the Holocaust. John Paul II , former archbishop of Krakow who has made several visits to Auschwitz, ended the controversy in 1993 by ordering the departure of the Carmelites.
In September 1997 , the French bishops issued a statement to Drancy of repentance for the insufficient response of the Church of France during the racial persecution. In 1998, after more than ten years of work of a commission of historians and churchmen, the publication by the Vatican document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah did not bring full satisfaction to the Jewish representatives. However, the repeated condemnation of anti-Semitism by Rome and by the national churches (including Polish), requests for forgiveness for the long anti-Judaism of the past and travel to John Paul II and Benedict XVI at Auschwitz showed the break official of the church with any temptation Semitic.
In March 2008 , German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed the Holocaust in a speech to the Knesset. "We, Germans, the Holocaust fills us with shame. I bow to his victims, survivors and those who helped them survive .
Repairs and financial restitution of stolen property
From the postwar period, some of the stolen property to Jews have been returned. But it was in the 1990s that the Aryanization began to be specific historical studies and extensive public surveys, and with the mission Mattoli established in 1997 by the French government.
In 1953 , a treaty signed between Germany and Israel provide for the payment by Bonn of a large indemnity. It was ratified despite opposition from some of the German political class and some Israelis shocked that Ben Gurion has negotiated directly with the Germans and Adenauer. The treaty will be strictly applied, with 845 million paid in 1965, 5,000 federal employees engaged in processing applications 4,276,000. In 1973, the work is considered 95% completed. The repairs have held up to 5% of the federal budget for the West Germany . In the late 1980s , nearly 30 billion dollars in compensation were paid, which was consistent and even higher expectations of the signatories of the 1953 text .
Industries that had exploited concentration camp labor Jewish postwar refused to acknowledge any moral responsibility and to pay any compensation. According to Paul Johnstone, large German companies "have stood up to walk to any claim in an amazing mix of meanness and arrogance." 13 million dollars had been paid in the mid -1980s to less than 15,000 Jews survivors (former slaves of IG Farben involving 1 700 each, those of AEG Telefunken 500, others less) and nothing had been paid to the families of those dead from exhaustion. It was not until 1999 that a compensation fund will be established in Germany and Austria for former forced laborers of Jewish death camps and labor camps, and even for some of the civilian workers who were brought forcibly Germany.
The communist states refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for a crime attributed to Western capitalism, let alone to pay any compensation until their disappearance. Austria, where the crowds had a triumphant reception to Hitler in 1938 and has provided by far the largest proportion of activists of the NSDAP and killers of the Holocaust, will appear as "first victim of Nazism" and refuse any lasting financial and moral recognition.
Memory of the Shoah
From the occultation ...
In the early years of the postwar period, the recent concept of genocide is far from being understood by everyone, and many contemporaries were unaware of the specificity of the fate that has struck the Jewish people, when they not refuse to believe or listen to the survivors, or when they do not suspect them of exaggerating or have worked to survive. Many survivors have very few, have no desire to insist themselves on their uniqueness, and prefer to view their membership found in the national community. Thus, in France, the victims of the deportations are often absurdly declared "dead in France," as if children, elderly and women were killed in battle .
The camp paradigmatic hell is not so Nazi Auschwitz , now distant and inaccessible behind the Iron Curtain , but Buchenwald , high place of martyrdom of the European resistance. Official anti-Semitism in Eastern forces, nothing on the monument of Babi Yar in the USSR or Birkenau in Poland does the Jewish character of the victims, and the National Museum of Auschwitz this camp as the place of martyrdom of the Polish resistance and Europe. Birkenau, where there were gas chambers, was abandoned by guides and visitors to the 1990's and turned over to weeds and the relative neglect, having already been sacked in part by the release of Polish civilians in search of "Jewish gold" and retrieve materials.
The concealment is also found across Europe. This is the time Night and Fog of Alain Resnais ( 1955 ) can show the gas chambers not to mention the Jews. In the late 1970s , during the preparation of the French pavilion at Auschwitz, a government official gets yet it is not made more mention of Jews than other groups, and that collaboration and French civil divisions are retracted .
The masterpiece of Primo Levi , If a man (1945), had the greatest difficulty in finding a publisher and an audience until the 1970s. The worldwide success since the 1950's the Diary of Anne Frank and her theatrical and cinematic adaptations exception, partly because it stops the arrest of the girl and does not describe the deportation or extermination. In France, since 1951 , Leon Poliakov published the first major study of the policy of extermination of Jews conducted by the Nazis in his book The Breviary of Hate, foreword by Franois Mauriac.
Overall, states and peoples prefer postwar emphasis on the heroism of the Resistance fighters, rather than suffering and victims. Implicitly, those who endured the deportation without having done anything except be born Jews are seen as necessarily less deserving than the resisters who know why they were deported .
Even Israel does not have referred the matter to his rise to the Holocaust, and preferred to focus on the few heroes who fought the Nazis with arms in hand rather than on the mass of those killed without being able to defend themselves. Significantly, the genocide is commemorated on April 19, the anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto , and known as "Heroes Day".
... to the centrality
The prospect does not spill until the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 , the Six Day War (1967) by which world opinion has genuinely feared a 'new Auschwitz' in case of victory Arabic, awakening Jewish memory with the change of generation, and especially the 1970s , where the specificity of the Holocaust and its centrality are now better established by historians and better knowledge brought to a wider audience.
Dissemination of the television series Holocaust ( 1979 ) and had a huge impact on the public, particularly American or German, as the future success of Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg or Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni. In 1985, the documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann had such an impact now that the word was used to designate the Judeocide in most languages, except English-speaking country remained loyal to the term Holocaust (see below for details).
The need to fight against counterfeiters deniers from the 1970s has also stimulated the work history and prompted many witnesses to break their silence.
No Nazi has never denied the crime during his trial, confirmed by the testimonies of many victims and executioners, and the superfluous material and documentary evidence, including the hand of the senior (Goebbels diary, reports and Himmler's secret speech, Hitler's will). But from the 1970s in the wake of pioneers such as writers Maurice Bardeche ( fascist claimed) or Paul Rassinier (former elected SFIO then moved to the far right), pseudo-historians, one of whose leaders is Robert Faurisson have undertaken, particularly in France to deny the reality of the genocide of Jews. Their attacks were made including the existence of gas chambers (though that, moreover, they have killed just under half of the victims, others were starved or shot).
According to men and groups, their primary motivations have been the anti-Semitism , the rehabilitation of Nazism, the anti-Zionist radical (the Holocaust as a lie made to legitimize the State of Israel) or an anti- fanatic eager denying the Nazi crimes and erasing the specificity of the Holocaust to prove that nothing was worse than communism .
The cons-attack by historians, witnesses and the government has finally dispelled their theses. They continue however to find a favorable hearing in certain movements of the extreme right in Europe (several executives of the National Front , including Jean-Marie Le Pen , have regularly hit the headlines and been sentenced in court for remarks to say the least ambiguous Shoah ). As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are widespread in the Arab world and Muslim world. Elected in 2005 , the President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stepped up provocations, particularly on the Holocaust, which he described myth several times, launching a competition for cartoons about the Holocaust or convening in 2007 a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. Despite opposition from some historians of the Holocaust, some western states have passed laws against the denial of Nazi crimes against humanity, and Israel, Germany, Austria or France with Gayssot of 1990.
In response to the Holocaust deniers, U.S. President Jimmy Carter launched in Washington in 1979 , construction of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , the largest Holocaust museum in the world. Inaugurated in 1993, he was preceded in 1951 by the memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris, the ancestor of the Holocaust memorial opened in 2005 , or in 1953 by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
The recent phenomenon of "Americanization of the Holocaust" has been noted by historians as the memory Annette Wieviorka. The term refers to the considerable space taken by the Holocaust in American public life, the importance of Hollywood in the delivery scope of the genocide to a wide audience, the role more and more of American historiography, supported by hard to match the abundant resources of local universities (the United States is one of the few countries where there are chairs of history of the Holocaust) .
Contemporary Controversies and the Future of Memory
Widely recognized as the main crime of the Nazis, and beyond, as one of the greatest crimes of history, the Holocaust, even by its exceptionality, has sometimes obscured in turn referred to the background or other crimes of the Nazis .
The " historians' quarrel "(Historikerstreit) in the FRG of the 1980s , revolved around the controversial remarks of a few conservative historians and nationalists like Ernst Nolte , accused by others as Jrgen Habermas of wanting to "trivialize" the Holocaust " normalize "the Nazi past, erasing the specificity of the genocidal Judeocide to better equivalent to Nazi crimes and those of communism and clearing futures Germany early in favor of a denunciation of the latter.
In the countries of the former communist East, the end of the old system was often accompanied by outbreaks of anti-Semitism and public open attempts to rehabilitate former collaborators of Hitler. Moreover, the autovictimisation and virulent denunciation of past decades under communism may leave little room for the memory of the Holocaust or the compromises of every country in the persecution .
The guilt associated with the Holocaust in Germany has also been perceived as a failure to mention the suffering endured by the civilian population. It is significant that a historian of the Holocaust, Jrg Friedrich , who felt he was authorized to publish as the first sum on the Allied bombing of the Reich , or a writer can hardly be suspected of convenience for Nazism, Gnter Grass experience that could evoke a novel in the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and its thousands of refugees.
The centrality by taking the issue of genocide is also reflected by the increasing controversy about men and institutions charged with complicity. Among the famous cases, the Austrian president and former UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim , the lawsuits filed by some former prisoners at national companies whose railways SNCF , the book resounding showing that IBM has sold to the Nazis a very sophisticated infrastructure for mass registration , etc..
Other controversies have surrounded the silence and passivity of players accused of neglecting the plight of Jews. Today there are countless books and discussions on the silence of Pope Pius XII , that of the International Committee of the Red Cross , removal of Raoul Wallenberg by the Soviets (without much reaction from her native Sweden) , the refusal of the Anglo-Saxons to bomb Auschwitz , slow U.S. or Zionist leaders in Palestine to worry about the deportations in Europe, the absence of any action of the French Resistance to stop the deportation trains ...
After Germany, each country also had to rediscover his own past and his own compromises in genocide, or simply its passivity.
Switzerland has thus rediscovered in the 1990s when she drove back Jewish refugees, and agreed to house the stolen gold in the camps. Belgium has rediscovered the compromise of the municipal authorities of Antwerp, where they had refused to Brussels to cooperate. France has rediscovered the extent of the compromises of the Vichy regime in Final Solution since the work of Robert Paxton (Vichy France, 1973) and a new generation of historians, who have shown that anti-Semitic laws were adopted without pressure from the Germans, the French government often went voluntarily to meet their demands, that the French police took part only in the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv ' or Pierre Laval insisted that the Germans emmnent Jews under 16 years they did not want to leave.
However, were also rediscovered the efforts of many strangers to save the Jews: witness the inauguration of the Pantheon in January 2007 , an inscription in honor of the Righteous of France.
At the time of the disappearance of the last witnesses of the Holocaust, the question of memory transmission to future generations is asked.
In France, after a controversial proposal President Nicolas Sarkozy , on 13 February 2008 to instruct the memory of a deported Jewish child every child student CM2 , which has not been implemented, Ministry of National Education has opened 5 December 2008 a website dedicated to teaching the Holocaust . It includes a brochure and more educational material and responds to proposals from a report .
Condemnation of Holocaust denial by the United Nations
On 23 January 2007 , the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted resolution condemning the denial 61/L.53 of the Holocaust in these terms:
- The General Assembly, .
Evocation of the Holocaust in the arts
The magnitude of the atrocity revealed to the world the liberation of the camps and during the Nuremberg trials had a profound minds. This feeling of horror and desolation is reflected in the artistic production of the second half of the twentieth century , first by the publication of testimony from victims and then by the explicit representation or metaphor of the Holocaust.
Music
- A Survivor from Warsaw, oratorio of Arnold Schoenberg ( 1947 )
- Different Trains, a piece for string quartet and tape of Steve Reich ( 1988 )
Historiography of Genocide
General trends
The pioneering works were all between the Breviary of Hatred of Leon Poliakov , published for the first time in 1951 , and The Destruction of European Jewry as published in 1955 by the American historian Raul Hilberg , these two books have gone through several editions in whenever enriched by their author. From the awakening of the 1970s , the Holocaust has become by far one of the most studied contemporary history, if not world history.
Traditionally, two parallel historiographies were devoted to the study one of the executioners, other than victims. At the first stream can relate the work of Omer Bartov , Philippe Burrin , Christopher Browning , Daniel Goldhagen , Jean-Claude Pressac , Ian Kershaw , Christian Gerlach , or Leon Poliakov. The second relates rather works for France, Anne Grynberg , Serge Klarsfeld , Michael Marrus , and Rene Poznanski. The sum of Saul Friedlnder , Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997-2007), provides the first synthesis of the two streams, integrating and articulating both numerous personal testimonies of victims, and overviews points for policy makers and implementers.
In recent years, newer historical work focused on the memory of the Shoah ( Annette Wieviorka particular), on the Aryanization (Verheyde Philippe, Jean-Marc Dreyfus , Florent Le Bot, etc..), the rediscovery of a href = "Crimes_de_guerre_de_la_Wehrmacht" alt = "War Crimes of the Wehrmacht"> war crimes of the Wehrmacht (German touring exhibition showing the compromise of officers and soldiers in German the massacres of Jews and other atrocities in the East has significantly contributed to the destruction, from 1997 , the postwar myth of a Wehrmacht with clean hands "that would have led an honorable war unlike SS ).
Another important trend is the renewed interest in the "Holocaust by bullets," highlighting the general public through the efforts of Father Patrick Desbois and his team in the 2000s to restore and open in the former USSR the mass graves of Jews shot by the Einsatzgruppen , and to capitalize the words of the last witnesses, and the Soviet archives now more easily accessible to Western scholars. Note however that the "Holocaust by bullets" was already known and studied by historians The debate on the genesis of the Holocaust In the 1980s especially, the discussion on the genesis of genocide precise opposite intentionalist and functionalist. For the former, the intention to exterminate the Jews of Europe preceded the declaration of war. This applies, in particular, Leon Poliakov of Saul Friedlnder , of Eberhard Jckel , of Lucy S. Dawidowicz , or Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. They rely on several texts of Hitler, including letters from 1919 and 1920 . In a first anti-Semitic text of 1919, Hitler developed a "rational Semitism." From that time, he explains that "Jews must make foreigners by law" and that the ultimate goal is "the expulsion of the Jews' social body . The pattern of persecution of Jews in the Third Reich is already drawn. Based on theses racialist antisemitism rational opposition to the pogroms. At the popular violence-based rejection and loathing, he chose the objective legitimacy of the law and streamlined in order to marginalize and criminalize the Jews and therefore to justify and legalize their persecution, which will be applied from the came to power . Historians also rely on passages from Mein Kampf , or the speech of 30 January 1939 , that a new world war would lead to "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" . In opposition to this thesis, many historians, especially Broszat Martin , Arno Mayer and Philippe Burrin , believe that the Nazis had not chosen the final solution before 1941. The extreme anti-Semitism of the Nazis is, according to this thesis, the necessary condition for the Holocaust rather than its direct cause. The Nazis decided to exterminate only after the invasion of Poland and the USSR has placed considerable masses of Jews under their authority, and after an emulation in the " polycracy Nazi "(Martin Broszat). After the start of the war, Himmler wrote in his diary after a meeting with Hitler on 18 December 1939 : "Jewish Question" To exterminate as supporters. "This is what comes closest, in coded language, a Fhrer order to eliminate all Jews in Europe . In 1990 and 2000 , other historians like Ian Kershaw , tried to go beyond debate . According to Kershaw, the Fhrer, with its "power charismatic "a new kind, is the man who makes possible the long-cherished plans for the" base ", unless he has no need to give orders precise, its mere presence in power allows the many anti-Semitic Germany triggering boycotts and pogroms , or doctors of the extreme right as Josef Mengele to perform the atrocious pseudo-medical experiments and operations of euthanasia mass whose idea existed before 1933. Thus also in the field, the extermination of Jews was often the result of local initiatives, often going to the decisions of the Fhrer. These were especially the work of officers of the SS and Gauleiters fanatics eager to please at any cost to the Fhrer by liquidating the earlier events in their strongholds. The Gauleiters Albert Forster in Danzig , Arthur Greiser in Warthegau or Erich Koch in Ukraine have competed and especially cruelty and brutality, the first two competing among themselves to each be the first to hold their verbal promise made Hitler their full Germanize territory within ten years . Beyond that, Adolf Hitler , a character very little bureaucratic and lacking any taste for the work followed, leaving everyone free to call him and do as he pleases provided he goes into the overall meaning of his will ( that a Nazi official summarized the formula: "work towards the Fhrer"). Each individual, each clan, each tape, each group rivals are competing and trying to be the first to realize the projects in broad set by Hitler. Thus the persecution of the Jews will get carried away and gradually move from mere persecution and genocide in the massacre industrial . Without its charismatic power, Hitler would never have been able to launch the Holocaust without writing a single written order. No running genocide never asked, just to see a written order simply Fhrersbefehl (Fhrer order) was sufficient to silence any questions and to cause obedience quasi-religious and indiscriminate killers. But not many "ordinary Germans," General SS or Hitler who built a speech that many were eager to hear, never Einsatzgruppen massacres or Auschwitz or Treblinka would have been possible. The archives of the Holocaust are preserved in several institutions, including : Discussions at the Nuremberg trials, and the documents used on this occasion, have been fully replicated in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg 14 November 1945-1 October 1946, work in 25 volumes published in Nuremberg from 1947 to 1949 and reprinted in 1993. Little systematic collection of oral testimonies were made. Foundation Spielberg has however undertaken since 1997 to examine all possible survivors, everyone is seeing take two hours of talks about life before, during and after the Holocaust . "Shoah" is a word Hebrew means "annihilation", "cataclysm", "catastrophe", "ruin", "desolation". It does not appear in the Torah , but three times in Nevi'im (Isaiah, 10, 3 and 47, 11 Zephaniah 1, 15) and three times in the Ketuvim (Psalms 35, 8 and 63, 10 , Job, 30, 3). It is now preferred in France " Holocaust " connoted religious meaning 'sacrifice leaves no trace of the victim. " Other countries, including the Anglo-Saxon, as well as the United Nations , continue to use preferred the term "Holocaust". It is in the Israeli daily Haaretz that the Hebrew word "Shoah" was used first to describe Nazi crimes . The Holocaust is a genocide , a term originally formed in 1944 by the jurist Raphael Lemkin to describe the extermination of the Jews of Europe. The French word for Holocaust is also used and its predecessor. The use of the term Holocaust was largely observed since the 1990s , following the release of the film of Claude Lanzmann , Shoah , in 1985. This is a documentary film composed of half past nine testimonies. This film is free of any document of record. This documentary is that imposed by the French use of the name "Holocaust" after the choice by the director of the Hebrew word that was already, for example, in the Hebrew text of the Declaration of Independence of the State Israel in 1948. Claude Lanzmann justifies the title of his film as follows: "If I could not name this film I would have. How could it be a name to name an unprecedented event in history? I said 'the thing'. Archives of the Holocaust
Origin of the word "Shoah"
If the Jewish genocide perpetrated during the Second World War is now commonly called the Holocaust, some reject the use of this term. This is the case of the linguist and translator Henry Meschonnic. He explained that the term "Holocaust" means "natural disaster" and adds: "The word" Shoah ", with its capital that essentializing, contains and maintains the performance of the theological-political, the final solution of the" deicide people " to be the true chosen people. It would be more healthy for the language that the word is no longer a day than the title of a film " . Elie Wiesel also contests this term as much as that of "Holocaust" even if he also uses. In his talks with Michael de Saint Cheron, in 1988 , he said he preferred the term "hourban" which, in the literature Yiddish on the event, also means "destruction" and refers to that of the Temple of Jerusalem. By their origin, these three words emphasize the Jewish character of the event .
The term "Holocaust" is even less fair because it means a sacrifice ritual (which has not prevented the Americans in 1993 to baptize their Museum United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ). The term "Judeocide" is also used, notably by historian Arno Mayer in The "Final Solution" in history .
References
- In France, the custom has sanctioned the use of the term "Holocaust" in preference to that of "Holocaust". And Le Petit Larousse (2004) says he came to the "Holocaust": "genocide of European Jews by the Nazis and their helpers from 1939 to 1945 Bibliography
General titles
- Bedarida Francis (ed.), The Nazi policy of extermination, ed. Albin Michel, 1989
- Id Nazism and Genocide. History and Issues, ed. Nathan, 1989
- George Benson, History of the Holocaust, Presses Universitaires de France , coll. "What do I know? " 2006 (1st ed., 1996 )
- Symposium of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales , Nazi Germany and the Jewish genocide, coed. Gallimard / Le Seuil, 1985
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz , The War against the Jews, ed. Hachette, 1977
- Saul Friedlnder , Nazi Germany and the Jews, ed. du Seuil, 1997, 2007
- Volume 1: The Years of Persecution: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1939
- Volume 2: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1939-1945
- Raul Hilberg , The Destruction of European Jewry, ed. Gallimard, 2006 , coll. "Folio", story, three vol.
- Id, Executors, victims, witnesses, ed. Gallimard, coll. "NRF"-essays, 1994 and "Folio", story, 2004
- Leon Poliakov , Breviary of Hate: the Third Reich and the Jews, Presses Pocket, 1993 (1st ed. Calmann-Lvy, 1951 )
- Reitlinger Gerald, The Final Solution, New York , ed. Vallentine, Mitchell & Co, 1968
- Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab Lands, Public Affairs, 2006
Historiography
- Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men, Les Belles Lettres, 1994.
- Philippe Burrin , Hitler and the Jews. Genesis of genocide, eds. du Seuil, 1989, and "Points"-history, 1995.
- Philippe Burrin, Resentment and Apocalypse. Essay on Nazi anti-Semitism, ed. du Seuil, "Points"-history, 2007.
- Collective face of history. Documents in the controversy over the singularity of the extermination of Jews by the Nazis, ed. Cerf, 1988.
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz , A Holocaust Reader, New York, Behram House, 1976.
- Id, The Holocaust and the Historians, Harvard University Press, 1981, repr., 1983.
- Id, "Perversions of The Holocaust," Commentary, October 1989, p. 56-61.
- Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, ed. Julliard, 1988.
- Saul Friedlnder, From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical Nazi Policies Toward Studies of the Jews, Yad Vashem Studies, XVI, 1984 , p. 1-50.
- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, ed. du Seuil, 1997 and "Points", 1998.
- Edouard Husson, an ordinary guilt? Hitler, the Germans and the Holocaust. The stakes of the controversy Goldhagen, ed. Franois-Xavier de Guibert, 1997.
- Id understand Hitler and the Holocaust. Historians of the Federal Republic of Germany and German identity since 1949, Presses Universitaires de France , coll. Perspectives Germanic ", 2000, repr., 2002 (foreword by Ian Kershaw ).
- Eberhard Jckel , Hitler's ideologist, ed. Calmann-Lvy, 1973, repr. Gallimard, "Tel", 1995.
- Ian Kershaw , What is Nazism? Problems and perspectives of interpretation, ed. Gallimard, coll. "Folio" History, 1997, Chapter 5, "Hitler and the Holocaust."
- Peter Longerich , "We do not know." The Germans and the Final Solution 1933-1945, Editions Heloise d'Ormesson, 2008, 596 p.
- Arno J. Mayer, The "Final Solution" in History, ed. Discovery, 1990 and 2002.
- Kevin P. Spicer, Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, Indiana University Press, 2007.
- (In) Dean Martin: Robbing the Jews - The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1935-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Monograph
- Danutha Czech et al, Auschwitz. Geshichte und der Wirkilchkeit Vernichtungslager, Hamburg, 1980
- Jacques Delarue , Histoire de la Gestapo, ed. Fayard, 1996 (1st ed. 1963)
- Tuwia Friedman, Sobibor, ein im NS-Vernichtungslager Rahmen der "Aktion Reinhard" dokumentarische eine Sammlung von SS-Dokumenten, Haifa , Institute of Documentation in Israel for Nazi war The Investigation of Crime, 1998
- Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Aldabert Rckel, The Gas Chambers, a state secret, ed. du Seuil, "Points"-story, 2000 (1st ed., 1987)
- Raul Hilberg and Joel Kotek (ed.), The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, ed. Complex, 1994
- Eberhard Jckel and Lea Rosh, "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland". Deportation der Juden und Ermordung, Kollaboration und Verweigerung in Europa, ed. Komet, 1990
- Krausnick Helmut and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe of Weltanschauungskrieges, Stuttgart, 1981
- Ralf Ogorreck, Einsatzgruppen. Advocacy groups and the genesis of the Final Solution, Calmann-Lvy, 2007
- Leon Poliakov , Auschwitz, ed. Gallimard, 1973 , repr., 2006
- Jean-Claude Pressac , Auschwitz. Technical and Operations of the Gas Chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989
- Id, The Crematoria of Auschwitz. The machinery of mass murder, eds. CNRS, 1993
- Richard Rhodes , Pest, the Nazi machine. Einsatzgruppen in the East, 1941-1943, ed. Otherwise, 2004
- Annette Wieviorka , Auschwitz, sixty years after, ed. Robert Laffont, 2004
- Georges Wellers , the gas chambers existed, documents, testimonies, numbers, ed. Gallimard, 1981
- Frederic Rousseau , The Warsaw Jewish child. History of Photography, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 2009 (Collection "L'Univers history") (award-winning book by the Fondation Auschwitz (Brussels) " Spring 2009)
The Holocaust in the satellites
- Frederick B. Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution, Pittsburgh, 1972
- Carol Iancu, The Holocaust in Romania, Publications of the University of Montpellier, 2000
- Roanid Iadu, Romania and the Holocaust. Destruction and survival of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu regime, 1940-1944, House of Human Sciences, 2003
- Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat , Der Staat-Kroatische Ustacha. 1941-1945, Stuttgart, 1964
- Laurent Joly , Vichy in the Final Solution. History of the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (1941-1944), ed. Grasset, 2006 (book from a dissertation doctorate in history)
- Ladislav Lipscher, Die Juden im Staat Slowakischen. 1939-1945, Munich, 1980
- Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton , Vichy and the Jews, ed. Calmann-Lvy, 1981, repr. French general bookstore, "The Pocket Book", 1990 and 2004
- Anne-Marie Matard Bonucci, Fascist Italy and the persecution of Jews, ed. Perrin, 2007
- Edmond Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia. A Record of Racial and Religious Persecution and massacres, Translated From The French by Louis Perkins, American Institute for Balkan Affairs, Chicago 1961
Victims and witnesses of the Holocaust
A large number of works has been identified in the following articles: List of testimony and diaries written during the Holocaust and list of stories from survivors of the Holocaust. The reader can consult effectively.
- Primo Levi , If this is a man , translated by Martine Schruoffeneger, Julliard , 1987, then reissued in 2002, plus an interview with the author by Philip Roth and two other unpublished texts
- Shlomo Venezia , Sonderkommando, ed. Albin Michel, 2007.
- Hermann Langbein, Men and Women at Auschwitz, Fayard, 1975.
- Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman (ed.), The Black Book on the Extermination of Jews by the villainous German fascist invaders in the temporarily occupied regions of the USSR and the extermination camps in Poland during the war of 1941-1945 : texts and testimonies, ed. Actes Sud, 1995, repr. French general bookstore, "The Pocket Book," two volumes, 2001
- Saul Friedlnder , Kurt Gerstein or the ambiguity of the property, Tournai , ed. Casterman, 1967
- Itzhok Noborski and Annette Wieviorka (ed.), The Books of Remembrance: Jewish memorial in Poland, ed. Julliard et al. "Archives", 1983
- Georges Gheldman , July 16, 1942 , 2005, Berg International. It is appended to this book the full transcript of the testimony of George Gheldman at the trial of Maurice Papon.
- The Disappeared of Daniel Mendelsohn , research by the author witnesses the fate of some of his missing family in the Holocaust in Ukraine
The Holocaust, the great powers and neutral countries
- Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, ed. du Rocher, 1965
- Saul Friedlnder , Pius XII and the Third Reich, ed. du Seuil, 1964
- Guenter Lewy , The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, ed. Stock, 1965
- Michael Fayer, The Church and the Nazis. 1930-1965, Liana Levi, 2002 (translated from English in the United States by Claude Bonnafont)
- Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies: A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler's Mass Murder, Owl Books, 1990
- Jean-Pierre Richardot Another Switzerland, 1940-1944, edited by Feline, 2002
- Stanford Jay Shaw , Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945, New York University Press, 1993
- David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews. The Americans and the Final Solution, ed. Flammarion, 1987
Notes
Related articles
- Literature of the Holocaust
- Cinema and Holocaust
- Marking system of Nazi prisoners
- Holocaust denial | Denial | Revisionism
- Lest We Forget
- History of Jews in Germany
- Porajmos | Programme Aktion T4
External Links
General Sites
- Chronology of the Holocaust, from its origins at Nuremberg
- The Jews of Europe (1941-1945): Chronology of destruction - Akadem.com [pdf]
- (En) Multimedia Encyclopedia of the Holocaust United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
- Site of the Holocaust memorial - Archives, educational materials, testimonials
- Website of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah (Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah is created by government decree French 26 December 2000. Honorary President Simone Veil )
- A chronological and thematic approach of the Holocaust - HistoireDesJuifs.com
- Association website Fond Memory of Auschwitz (AFMA)
- Resources on the Nazi genocide and its denial
- (In) Reexamining The Wannsee Conference, Himmler's Appointments Book, and Tunisian Jews
The Holocaust by bullets
- The Holocaust by bullets, Jewish victims of the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe - Research Team of the Father Patrick Desbois , president of Yachad In Unum
- Exhibition "The Holocaust by bullets" at the Holocaust Memorial
Victims
- Ordinary exile - The Austrian Jewish refugees in France and Germany and Belgium, before the deportation, a life of exile
- Extermination by shooting in Latvia
- Music in the concentration camps [pdf]
- Sonderkommando.info - A site devoted to prisoners of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Executioners
- Einsatzgruppen, an introduction - History and Practice of Offsets Deniers (PHDN)
- The Exterminating daily in German documents - History and Practice of Offsets Deniers (PHDN)
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