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SCARCE UK Chief Rabbi Dr. J. H. Hertz kindertransport wwii mayor Paddington WOW For Sale
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SCARCE UK Chief Rabbi Dr. J. H. Hertz kindertransport wwii mayor Paddington WOW:
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A FANTASTIC PHOTO FROM 1930 OF
UK Chief Rabbi Dr. J. H. Hertz
MEASURING 8X10 INCHES SPEAKING WITH MAYOR OF PADDINGTON AT THE COSECRATION CEREMONY OF TGHE NEW BUILDING AT THE BOYSWATER SCHOOLS
F120873
CHIEF RABBI CONSECRATES NEW JEWISH SCHOOLS IN
LONDON, ENGLAND
The Rov. Dr. J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi, performed
the consecration ceremony of the new building of
the Bayswater School, at Lancaster Road, Notting
Hill, w..London. Photo shows- Dr. Hertz, speaking,
and the Mayor of Paddington at the Ceremony.
YOUR CREDIT LINE MUST READ (ACME)Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz, CH (September 25, 1872- January 14, 1946) was a Jewish Hungarian-born Rabbi and Bible scholar. He is most notable for holding the position of Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1913 until his death in 1946, in a period encompassing both world wars and The Joseph Herman Hertz, CH (September 25, 1872- January 14, 1946) was a Jewish Hungarian-born Rabbi and Bible scholar. He is most notable for holding the position of Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1913 until his death in 1946, in a period encompassing both world wars and The Holocaust.Hertz was born in the then Rebrény, Kingdom of Hungary (presently Slovak: Rebrín is part of Zemplínska Široká, Slovakia), and emigrated to New York City in 1884. He was educated at New York City College (BA), Columbia University (PhD) and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Rabbi, 1894, the Seminary\'s first graduate). His first Ministerial post was at Syracuse, New York.In 1898, he moved to (Transvaal), South Africa, to the Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Congregation in Johannesburg. He stayed there until 1911, despite attempts by President Paul Kruger in 1899 to expel him for his pro-British sympathies and for advocating the removal of religious disabilities of Jews and Catholics in South Africa. He was Professor of Philosophy at Transvaal University College (later known as the University of the Witwatersrand), 1906-8.In 1911, he returned to New York to the Orach Chayim Congregation.In 1913, Rabbi Hertz was appointed Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire; his rival candidates had included Rabbi Moses Hyamson, Rabbi Lewis Daly, and Rabbi Bernard Drachman. Rabbi Hertz held the post until his death. His period in office was marked by many arguments with a wide variety of people, mainly within the Jewish community; the Dictionary of National Biography describes him as a \"combative Conservative\". It was said that he was in favour of resolving disagreements by calm discussion - when all other methods had failed.Despite his title, he was not universally recognised as the final rabbinical authority, even in Britain. While he was Chief Rabbi of the group of Synagogues known as the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire, led by the United Synagogue, some new immigrants who had arrived since the 1880s regarded it as not orthodox enough. Hertz tried both persuasion and such force as he could muster to influence them; he added to his credibility among these immigrants by persuading Rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky to become head of the London Beth Din.Hertz antagonised others by his strong support for Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, when many prominent Jews were against it, fearing that it would lead to accusations against the Jewish community of divided loyalty. Hertz was strongly opposed to Reform and Liberal Judaism, though he did not allow this to create personal animosities, and had no objection in principle to attending the funerals of Reform Jews.However, despite all this, his eloquent oratory, lucid writing, erudition and sincerity earned him the respect of the majority of British Jews and many outside the Jewish community[citation needed]. His commentary on the Torah is still to be found in most Orthodox synagogues and Jewish homes in Great Britain.He was ex officio President of Jews\' College, and Acting Principal, 1939-45. He was President of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1922-3, and of the Conference of Anglo-Jewish Preachers. He was on the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Chairman of the Governing Body of its Institute of Jewish Studies. He was Vice-President of a wide variety of Jewish and non-Jewish bodies, including the Anglo-Jewish Association, the London Hospital, the League of Nations Union, the National Council of Public Morals and King George\'s Fund for Sailors. In 1942, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, Chief Rabbi Hertz founded the Council of Christians and Jews to combat anti-Jewish bigotry.His daughter Judith married Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld.His great granddaughter is the writer Noreena Hertz.In the 1920s, Hertz successfully organised international opposition to proposed calendar reform. The League of Nations was considering a calendar amendment, such that a given date would fall on the same day of the week every year. This requires that one day every year (two in leap years) is not any day of the week but a \"world day\". Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal.Hertz edited notable commentaries on the Torah (1929-36, one volume edition 1937) and the Jewish Prayer Book or Siddur (1946). He also contributed to the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica. Affirmations of Judaism, a collection of his sermons, was well regarded. He published a further three volumes of Sermons, Addresses, and Studies.
A Book of Jewish Thoughts (1917), a selection of Jewish wisdom through the millennia, was immensely popular and ran to 25 editions.
The Battle for the Sabbath at Geneva, an account of his work opposing calendar reform.He was made a Companion of Honour in 1943. He was also Commander of the Order of Léopold II of Belgium and had a Columbia University medal.Source: all
Rabbi Dr. Joseph Herman Hertz\'s Timeline
1872
September 25, 1872
Birth of Rabbi Dr. Joseph Herman Hertz
Zemplínska Široká, Michalovce District, Košice Region, Slovakia
1906
February 27, 1906
Birth of Samuel Moses Hertz
South Africa
1907
April 22, 1907
Birth of Leon Michael Hertz
Johannesburg, City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Gauteng, South Africa
1909
October 6, 1909
Birth of Daniel Henry Hertz
Johannesburg, City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Gauteng, South Africa
1913
May 22, 1913
Birth of Judith Helen Schonfeld
London, UK
1914
September 10, 1914
Birth of Josephine Eva Hertz
London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom
1919
May 27, 1919
Birth of Ruth Hecht
London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom
1946
January 14, 1946
Age 73
Death of Rabbi Dr. Joseph Herman Hertz at Marylebone
Marylebone, Greater London, England, United KingdomJoseph Herman Hertz was the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1913 until his death in 1946. He was the editor of the Hertz Chumash, the first English language translation of the Five Books of Moses with associated Haftaroth and commentary.Hertz was born on September 25, 1872, in Rubrin, in what is now Slovakia. His family moved to America around 1883. He grew up in the Lower East Side New York speaking Yiddish.In 1886, Hertz began studying at the newly established Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). Reflective of his role in bridging Jewish and non-Jewish scholarship, he received his BA from New York City College (BA) and, in a two-day period in 1894, he received his PhD from Columbia University (on the philosophy of James Martineau) and became the first rabbi ordained by JTS.After a short tenure in Syracuse, NY (1894-98), Hertz was appointed rabbi of the Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Congregation in Johannesburg, South Africa. While there he agitated for greater Jewish rights under Kruger’s Boer regime. At the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1899, Kruger declared him an enemy of the state. Hertz took refuge in British controlled parts of South Africa until Johannesburg fell to Lord Roberts’ army in 1902.
Return to AmericaIn 1909, he returned to America to serve as a rabbi and teacher at the JTS.Hertz defined his aims in 1919: to uphold “the teachings and practices which have come down to the House of Israel through the ages; the positive Jewish beliefs concerning God, the Torah and Israel; the sacred Festivals; the holy resolve to maintain Israel’s identity; and the life consecrated by Jewish observances.”This was nuanced by his commitment to what he called “progressive conservatism,” by which he meant “religious advance without loss of traditional Jewish values and without estrangement from the collective consciousness of the House of Israel.” Hertz drew on general world culture and archaeological research as well as traditional sources to demonstrate the sophistication and continuing relevance of biblical thought.In 1911, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Hermann Adler, died and Rabbi Hertz sought the position. His reputation, diplomatic skill, and possibly his loyalty to the British cause while in South Africa helped him gain this position in 1913. In this role he led the Orthodox communities of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations.In midlife, Hertz was struck by two personal tragedies. His wife Rose died in 1930 at age 49. Six years later, Hertz’s son Daniel committed suicide at the age of 26. After these events he turned to an energetic partner in the young rabbi named Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld. In 1939, Schonfeld married Hertz’s daughter Judith, and the alliance became familial.
ZionismHertz was a committed Zionist. In 1917, he advocated for the Balfour Declaration which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Before the British Government issued the declaration, they sought the opinion of eight leading British Jews. While there was significant opposition to Zionism in Anglo-Jewry, Hertz was one of the five who urged the government to issue the declaration.
TheologyHertz viewed his mission as defending Judaism from attacks from Liberal Judaism (the Anglo version of American Reform) and biblical criticism, which viewed the Torah as the result of multiple human authors. To the first group he proclaimed, “You have dethroned God; and you have put your own reason in His place. You pick and choose among His precepts, retaining only those which suit your inclination or expediency.” To the second idea, Hertz held that “Judaism stands or falls with its belief in the historical actuality of the Revelation at Sinai.”Hertz’s defense of tradition combined secular education and interests with strict observance. Hertz sought to reconcile the Orthodox Jewish view of the divine revelation of Scriptures with the findings of modern science.In halakhic matters Hertz worked to balance pressures for change with loyalty to halakha. Hertz consistently refused to allow the organ to be played at Shabbat and Yom Tov services, even by a non-Jew and would not allow any move toward mixed seating of men and women in prayer.
Calendar ReformIn the 1920s, the League of Nations considered a system called the World Calendar, which enabled a given date to fall on the same day of the week every year. This resulted in days being skipped or added, which meant the Jewish Sabbath would not occur every seventh day. Hertz realized this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilized worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal.
World War IIFrom the early 1930s, Hertz called attention to Nazi intentions and atrocities, rallying Jewish and non-Jewish leaders in support of European Jewry. Through the Council of Christians and Jews and the Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council, he persuaded the British Government to grant visas to thousands of refugees, including 10,000 children and 500 rabbis of all denominations. While using every means possible to save Jews, Hertz was opposed to the Kindertransport if it meant Jewish refugee children would be raised in the homes of gentiles.
WritingsHertz’s best-selling volume for many years was a collection of quotations by and about Jews, A Book of Jewish Thoughts. Originally assembled for British soldiers in the First World War, it eventually went into 22 editions, was translated into at least seven languages, and had sold a quarter of a million copies by 1953.The Pentateuch and Haftorahs of Rabbi Hertz shaped the way in which English-speaking Jewish laypersons understood their Judaism in the next half century.There were already English commentaries on the Five Books before that of Rabbi Hertz, but they were written by non-Jews, and Hertz felt they had an anti-Jewish bias. Hertz described such commentaries: “As if a version of Shakespeare were made into Spanish by a Spaniard who had but an imperfect acquaintance with English…and who was filled with hatred and contempt for the British character and the entire British people.”The Hertz Chumash served the very practical need for a commentary that could be used in the synagogue. The volume combined a Hebrew text of the weekly Torah reading cycle, translated into English, with a wide-ranging commentary that explained and fortified Jewish faith.The volume we now know as the Hertz Chumash had a gradual and difficult birth. The work was written with the aid of four collaborators (Joshua Abelson, Abraham Cohen, Gerald Friedlander, and Samuel Frampton) and began as a single volume of the book of Genesis. There was a dispute when only the editorship of Rabbi Hertz was shown on the title page (although the others were acknowledged in the introduction.)Published in 1929, the Genesis volume sold poorly, and Hertz considered canceling the publication of the remaining volumes. But others attributed the sales to a hesitancy to buy the single volumes when they anticipated publication of the entire five books in one work.In 1936, the Soncino Press published the combined five volumes and changed the text of the English translation from the revised King James version to what some felt was a more readable 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation. With the Soncino edition, sales took off and the work became the mainstay of English-speaking synagogues of every denomination for decades, with estimated sales of 20,000 to 50,000.
CommentaryHertz was a staunch traditionalist and a fiery advocate for the Divine authorship of the Bible and the integrity of the Oral Law. Much of his commentary waxed apologetic about the divinity of the Torah and polemicized against those who rejected it.Hertz put special focus on rebutting the ideas of 19th century German Christian theologian Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). Hertz reinforced the morality and authenticity of biblical and rabbinic Jewish law and argued for Judaism’s advantages over what he saw as the Greco-Roman influenced Christian faith. To prove his points, Hertz harnessed the tools and methods of the critics themselves. For instance, he cited non-Jewish scholars as often as he referred to Jewish ones. Hertz referenced archaeological findings and a parallel Babylonian flood story.Hertz provided rational explanations for what appeared to be supernatural if they did not compromise his conviction that God can and does act in history. He accepted the evolutionary development of humans but rejected the view that evolution lowers the place of humans in creation. Hertz theorized that the plagues visited on the Egyptians were miraculously intensified versions of natural catastrophes.It took until 1981 for the Reform movement to emulate the Hertz’s Chumash. Two Orthodox alternatives appeared in the 1980s: a translation of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s 19th Century Torah commentary, and the Living Torah by the mystical writer Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan.In 1993, the ArtScroll’s Stone Edition became widespread in use, and signaled a change in Orthodox thinking, omitting non-Jewish sources, and fortifying Jewish practice by tradition rather than by scientific and anthropological argument. In 2006, the Chabad Lubavitch movement published the Gutnick Edition.Hertz served as ex officio President of Jews’ College. He was President of the Jewish Historical Society of England, and of the Conference of Anglo-Jewish Preachers. He was Vice-President of a wide variety of Jewish and non-Jewish bodies, including the Anglo-Jewish Association, the London Hospital, the League of Nations Union, the National Council of Public Morals and King George’s Fund for Sailors.In 1942, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, Hertz founded the Council of Christians and Jews to combat anti-Jewish bigotry.In 1925, he was made a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Hertz was a powerful leader of world Judaism during the period of two World Wars, the tragedy of the Holocaust and the gestation of the future State of Israel. He employed novel approaches to defend Jewish tradition and informed Jewish practice throughout the 20th Century.Joseph Hertz died on January 14, 1946.Joseph Herman Hertz CH (25 September 1872 – 14 January 1946) was a British Rabbi and biblical scholar. He held the position of Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1913 until his death in 1946, in a period encompassing both world wars and the Holocaust.
Early lifeHertz was born in Rebrín/Rebrény, Kingdom of Hungary (presently part of the village of Zemplínska Široká, Slovak Republic), in 1872 and immigrated to New York City in 1884. He was educated at New York City College (BA), Columbia University (PhD) and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Rabbi, 1894, the Seminary\'s first graduate). His first ministerial post was in Syracuse, New York at what is now Temple Adath Yeshurun.
South AfricaIn 1898, he moved to Transvaal, South Africa, to the Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Congregation in Johannesburg. He stayed there until 1911, despite attempts by President Paul Kruger in 1899 to expel him for his pro-British sympathies and for advocating the removal of religious disabilities of Jews and Catholics in South Africa. He was Professor of Philosophy at Transvaal University College (later known as the University of the Witwatersrand), 1906–8.In 1911, he returned to New York to the Orach Chayim Congregation.
Chief Rabbi
Rabbi Hertz in the late 1920sIn 1913, Hertz was elected Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire; he received 298 votes against 39 for Dayan Moses Hyamson.[1] His rival candidates had also included Bernard Drachman.Hertz held the post until his death. His tenure was affected by arguments with a wide variety of people, mainly within the Jewish community; the Dictionary of National Biography describes him as a \"combative Conservative\". It was said that he was in favour of resolving disagreements by calm discussion – when all other methods had failed.[2]Despite his title, he was not universally recognised as the final rabbinical authority, even in Britain. While he was Chief Rabbi of the group of synagogues known as the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire, led by the United Synagogue, a minority of new immigrants who had arrived since the 1880s regarded it as insufficiently orthodox. Hertz tried both persuasion and such force as he could muster to influence them; he added to his credibility among these immigrants by persuading Rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky to become head of the London Beth Din.Hertz antagonised others by his strong support for Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, when many Jews were against it, fearing that it would lead to accusations against the Jewish community of divided loyalty. Hertz was strongly opposed to Reform and Liberal Judaism, though he did not allow this to create personal animosities, and had no objection in principle to attending the funerals of Reform Jews.However, despite all this, his eloquent oratory, lucid writing, erudition and sincerity earned him the respect of the majority of British Jews and many outside the Jewish community.[3][4] His commentary on the Torah is still to be found in most Orthodox synagogues and Jewish homes in Great Britain. Despite there being some Ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not look up to Hertz, prominent Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Nosson Scherman maintained that Hertz \"was a great man,\" a courageous Rabbi, and that although he was affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary Hertz \"was Orthodox, without any question.\"[5]Although Hertz vigorously denounced the horror of the Holocaust (at one point relating an eyewitness claim that \"German soldiers in football attire entered [a] stadium [near Kiev]. They snatched the infants from their mothers\' arms and used them as footballs, bouncing and kicking them around the arena.\"),[6] Hertz was opposed to the Kindertransport if it meant Jewish refugee children would be raised in the homes of gentiles.[7] Hertz saw the British war effort in the noblest of terms, wishing Prime Minister Winston Churchill a happy 70th birthday in late 1944 with the message, \"But for your wisdom and courage there would have been a Vichy England lying prostrate before an all-powerful Satanism that spelled slavery to the western peoples, death to Israel, and night to the sacred heritage of man.\"[8]He was ex officio President of Jews\' College, and Acting Principal, 1939–45. He was President of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1922–3 and after his tenure was over, he continued to preside over lectures at the society including a lecture by then Chief Rabbi of Cologne, Germany, Rabbi Dr. Adolf Kober in 1937.[9] He was also President of the Conference of Anglo-Jewish Preachers. He was on the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Chairman of the Governing Body of its Institute of Jewish Studies. He was Vice-President of a wide variety of Jewish and non-Jewish bodies, including the Anglo-Jewish Association, the London Hospital, the League of Nations Union, the National Council of Public Morals and King George\'s Fund for Sailors. In 1942, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, Hertz founded the Council of Christians and Jews to combat anti-Jewish bigotry.His daughter Judith married Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld. His great granddaughter is the economist Noreena Hertz.
Imperial tourFrom 1920 to 1921, Hertz became the first chief rabbi to undertake a pastoral tour of the British Empire. He arrived at the idea of such a tour after reading reports of the Prince of Wales\' successful tour of Canada following the First World War and decided to do something similar to visit small Jewish communities in the British Dominions (later known as the British Commonwealth). Hertz \"Imperial tour\" took him 40,000 miles and to 42 Jewish communities over 11 months in South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Canada. He lectured extensively on the Bible to Jews and non-Jews and sought to raise £1 million for Jewish education.[10]He began his tour in South Africa , which had a Jewish population of 66,000, on 27 October 1920 and travelled throughout the country over a period of three months, covering 5,000 miles by railway, including stops in several smaller communities as well as the Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, where he was greeted by Prime Minister Jan Smuts, followed by a trip to Bulawayo in neighbouring Rhodesia. He then proceeded to Australia, with 20,000 Jews, where he delivered lectures in 20 communities. His travels then took him to New Zealand, with 2,500 Jews, stopped in Fiji where a few Jewish families were living, before arriving in Canada, with 125,000 Jews, on July 4, 1921 for a six-week tour that took him across Western Canada with stops in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg delivering eleven sermons and speaking at thirteen meetings as well as receptions with four Lieutenant-Governors, received by seven Mayors and visiting three provincial Premiers. He carried out many engagements in the large Jewish centres of Toronto and in what was then Canada\'s largest Jewish community of 40,000 in Montreal, highlighted by an address to 2,000 children in a park. He continued to Halifax, Nova Scotia before concluding with a Bible lecture in St. John, New Brunswick, departing Canada on August 16, 1921.[11][12][10]After returning to England, he wrote “I had preached love and loyalty to the Empire wherever I went, and sown the seeds of Jewish idealism and spirituality in all the far-off places I had visited.” He was granted a private audience with King George V at Buckingham Palace in November to discuss his visit.[12]
Calendar reformIn the 1920s, Hertz successfully organised international opposition to a proposed calendar reform.[13] The League of Nations was considering a calendar amendment, The World Calendar, such that a given date would fall on the same day of the week every year. This requires that one day every year (two in leap years) is not any day of the week but a \"world day\". Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal.
HonoursHe was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1943.[14] He was also Commander of the Order of Léopold II of Belgium[15] and had a Columbia University medal.A memorial plaque on his former London home at 103 Hamilton Terrace, Maida Vale was unveiled on 12 March 1996.[16]
Publications Affirmations of Judaism, a collection of his sermons, was well regarded. He published a further three volumes of Sermons, Addresses, and Studies.
A Book of Jewish Thoughts (1917), a selection of Jewish wisdom through the millennia, was immensely popular and ran to 25 editions.
The Battle for the Sabbath at Geneva, an account of his work opposing calendar reform.Hertz edited a Hebrew-English edition of the Jewish Prayer Book or Siddur (1946), and contributed to the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Hertz ChumashHertz edited a significant commentary on the Torah (1929–36,[17] one volume edition 1937). Published as The Pentateuch and Haftorahs and popularly known as the Hertz Chumash, this classic Hebrew-English edition of the Five Books of Moses, with corresponding Haftorahs, is used in many synagogues and classrooms throughout the English-speaking world.[18] The work - through its commentary and essays - is noted for its stance against Higher Criticism. [19]It is also referred to as the Hertz Pentateuch, and it includes the following features:[20] \"extensive essays on ... perceived conflict between science and religion\"
comparisons of \"Torah’s laws and those in the Code of Hammurabi\"
comments from and source references to Christian sources, including the Authorized Version (King James Version) and Revised VersionIt also includes views of the most important medieval Jewish commentators, such as Abraham ibn Ezra, Rashi, Ramban, Radak, Sforno and Ralbag (Gersonides).[21][22]The actual writing, which produced five volumes, was done by four other people,[23] but \"Hertz recast their material into his own style.\"When the five volumes were combined into a single volume (and published by Soncino Press), the Revised Version translation, but not the non-Jewish commentaries, were replaced with the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation.[23] Both translations were lightly edited by Hertz (e.g., at Lev. 27:29 RV and Num. 10:33 JPS).
Further reading Harvey Warren Meirovich: A Vindication of Judaism: The Polemics of the Hertz Pentateuch. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1998.
Joseph Aaron Skloot: Moses of Hamilton Terrace: The Hertz Torah Commentary in Context and Interpretation. Thesis No. 19200, in fulfilment of the requirements for an A.B. degree in History. Princeton University, 2005.
Derek Taylor: Chief Rabbi Hertz: The Wars of the Lord. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2014.The Kindertransport (German for \"children\'s transport\") was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children,[1] most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil.[2][3] The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.Smaller numbers of children were taken in via the programme by the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, and Switzerland.[4][5][6] The term \"kindertransport\" may also be applied to the rescue of mainly Jewish children from Nazi German territory to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. An example is the 1,000 Chateau de La Hille children who went to Belgium.[3][7] However, most often the term is restricted to the organised programme of the United Kingdom.The Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief) was established in 1933 to support in whatever way possible the needs of Jews in Germany and Austria.In the United States, the Wagner–Rogers Bill was introduced in Congress, which would have increased the quota of immigrants by bringing to the U.S. a total of 20,000 refugee children, but it did not pass.
PolicyOn 15 November 1938, five days after the devastation of Kristallnacht, the \"Night of Broken Glass\", in Germany and Austria, a delegation of British, Jewish, and Quaker leaders appealed, in person, to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain.[8] Among other measures, they requested that the British government permit the temporary admission of unaccompanied Jewish children, without their parents.The British Cabinet debated the issue the next day and subsequently prepared a bill to present to Parliament.[9] The bill stated that the government would waive certain immigration requirements so as to allow the entry into Great Britain of unaccompanied children ranging from infants up to the age of 17, under a number of conditions.No limit upon the permitted number of refugees was ever publicly announced. Initially, the Jewish refugee agencies considered 5,000 as a realistic target goal. However, after the British Colonial Office turned down the Jewish agencies\' separate request to allow the admission of 10,000 children to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, the Jewish agencies then increased their planned target number to 15,000 unaccompanied children to enter Great Britain in this way.[citation needed]During the morning of 21 November 1938, before a major House of Commons debate on refugees, the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare met a large delegation representing Jewish groups, as well as Quaker and other non-Jewish groups, working on behalf of refugees. The groups, though considering all refugees, were specifically allied under a non-denominational organisation called the \"Movement for the Care of Children from Germany\".[10] This organisation was considering only the rescue of children, who would need to leave their parents behind in Germany.In that debate of 21 November 1938, Hoare paid particular attention to the plight of children.[11] He reported that enquiries in Germany had determined that nearly every parent asked had said that they would be willing to send their child off unaccompanied to the United Kingdom, leaving their parents behind.[12][a]Although Hoare declared that he and the Home Office \"shall put no obstacle in the way of children coming here,\" the agencies involved had to find homes for the children and also fund the operation to ensure that none of the refugees would become a financial burden on the public. Every child had to have a guarantee of £50 sterling to finance his or her eventual re-emigration, as it was expected the children would stay in the country only temporarily.[13] Hoare made it clear that the monetary and housing and other aid required had been promised by the Jewish community and other communities.[11]
Organisation and management
Für Das Kind
Vienna, Westbahnhof Station 2008, a tribute to the British people for saving the lives of thousands of children from Nazi terror through the Kindertransports
Duration: 2 minutes and 51 seconds.2:51
Jewish children leave Prague for Britain by flight organised by the Barbican Mission to the Jews, 11 January 1939[14]Within a short time, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, later known as the Refugee Children\'s Movement (RCM), sent representatives to Germany and Austria to establish the systems for choosing, organising, and transporting the children. The Central British Fund for German Jewry provided funding for the rescue operation.[15]On 25 November, British citizens heard an appeal for foster homes on the BBC Home Service radio station from former Home Secretary Viscount Samuel. Soon there were 500 offers, and RCM volunteers started visiting possible foster homes and reporting on conditions. They did not insist that the homes for Jewish children should be Jewish homes. Nor did they probe too carefully into the motives and character of the families: it was sufficient for the houses to look clean and the families to seem respectable.[16]In Germany, a network of organisers was established, and these volunteers worked around the clock to make priority lists of those most in peril: teenagers who were in concentration camps or in danger of arrest, Polish children or teenagers threatened with deportation, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were too impoverished to keep them, or children with a parent in a concentration camp. Once the children were identified or grouped by list, their guardians or parents were issued a travel date and departure details. They could only take a small sealed suitcase with no valuables and only ten marks or less in money. Some children had nothing but a manila tag with a number on the front and their name on the back,[17] others were issued with a numbered identity card with a photo:[18]
Memorial plaque at Harwich, including a poem by Karen GershonThe first party of 196 children arrived at Harwich on the TSS Prague on 2 December, three weeks after Kristallnacht, disembarking at Parkeston Quay.[19][20] A plaque unveiled in 2011 at Harwich harbour marks this event.[20]In the following nine months almost 10,000 unaccompanied children, mainly Jewish, travelled to England.[21]There were also Kindertransports to other countries, such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. Dutch humanitarian Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer arranged for 1,500 children to be admitted to the Netherlands; the children were supported by the Dutch Committee for Jewish Refugees, which was paid by the Dutch Jewish Community.[22] In Sweden, the Jewish Community of Stockholm negotiated with the government for an exception to the country\'s restrictive policy on Jewish refugees for a number of children. Eventually around 500 Jewish children from Germany aged between 1 and 15 were granted temporary residence permits on the condition that their parents would not try to enter the country. The children were selected by Jewish organisations in Germany and placed in foster homes and orphanages in Sweden.[23]Initially the children came mainly from Germany and Austria (part of the Greater Reich after Anschluss). From 15 March 1939, with the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, transports from Prague were hastily organised. In February and August 1939, trains from Poland were arranged. Transports out of Nazi-occupied Europe continued until the declaration of war on 1 September 1939.A smaller number of children flew to Croydon Airport, mainly from Prague.[24] Other ports in England receiving the children included Dover.[24][25]
Last transport
The SS Bodegraven carried the last group of Kindertransport children away from continental Europe during the Second World War. It left IJmuiden harbour on 14 May 1940 shortly before the invading German armies reached the port.The last transport from the continent with 74 children left on the passenger-freighter SS Bodegraven [nl; de] on 14 May 1940, from IJmuiden, Netherlands. Their departure was organised by Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, the Dutch organiser of the first transport from Vienna in December 1938. She had collected 66 of the children from the orphanage on the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, part of which had been serving as a home for refugees.[26] She could have joined the children, but chose to remain behind.[27] This was a rescue action, as occupation of the Netherlands was imminent, with the country capitulating the next day. This ship was the last to leave the country freely.As the Netherlands was under attack by German forces from 10 May and bombing had been going on, there was no opportunity to confer with the parents of the children. At the time of this evacuation, these parents knew nothing of the evacuation of their children: according to unnamed sources, some of the parents were initially very upset about this action and told Wijsmuller-Meijer that she should not have done this.[citation needed] After 15 May, there was no more opportunity to leave the Netherlands as the country\'s borders were closed by the Nazis.
Trauma suffered by the children
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)Many children went through trauma during their extensive Kindertransport experience.[citation needed] Reports of this trauma is often presented in personal terms, with trauma varying based on the child\'s experiences, including their age at separation from their parents, their experience during the wartime, and their experience after the war.The primary trauma experienced by children in the Kindertransport was the separation from their parents. Depending on the child\'s age, the explanation for why they were leaving the country and their parents differed widely: for example, children might be told \"you are going on an exciting adventure\", or \"you are going on a short trip and we will see you soon\". Young children, roughly six or younger, would generally not accept such an explanation and would demand to stay with their parents.Older children, who were \"more willing to accept the parents\' explanation\", would nevertheless realise that they would be separated from their parents for a long or indefinite period of time; younger children, in contrast, who had no developed sense of time, would not be able to comprehend that they may see their parents again, thus making the trauma of separation total from the beginning. The actual leaving, via railway station, was also not a peaceful process, and there are many records[where?] of tears and screaming at the various railway stations where the actual parting took place.Having to learn a new language, in a country where the child\'s native German or Czech was not understood, was another cause of stress. To have to learn to live with strangers, who only spoke English, and accept them as \"pseudo-parents\", was a trauma. At school, the English children would often view the refugee children as \"enemy Germans\" instead of \"Jewish refugees\".Before the war started on 1 September 1939, and even during the first part of the war, some parents were able to escape from Hitler and reach England and then reunite with their children. However, this became the exception, as most of the parents of the refugee children were murdered by the Nazis.[citation needed]Older refugee children became fully aware of the war in Europe during the period of 1939–1945 and would become concerned for their parents. During the latter years of the war, they may have become aware of the Holocaust and the actual direct threat to their Jewish parents and extended family. After the war ended in 1945, nearly all the children learned, sooner or later, that their parents had been murdered.[28][29]In November 2018, for the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport programme, the German government announced that it would make a payment of €2,500 (about US$2,800 at the time) to each of the \"Kinder\" who was still alive.[30] This payment, although a token amount, represented an explicit recognition and acceptance of the immense damage that had been done to each child, both psychological and material.
Transportation and programme completion
Flor Kent\'s memorial at Liverpool Street station, relocated to the station\'s concourse in 2011[31]The Nazis had decreed that the evacuations must not block ports in Germany, so most transport parties went by train to the Netherlands; then to a British port, generally Harwich, by ferry from the Hook of Holland near Rotterdam.[32] From the port, a train took some of the children to Liverpool Street station in London, where they were met by their volunteer foster parents. Children without prearranged foster families were sheltered at temporary holding centres at summer holiday camps such as Dovercourt and Pakefield, with the Broadreeds holiday camp, at Selsey, West Sussex, being used as a transit camp for girls.[33] While most transports went via train, some also went by boat,[34] and others aeroplane.[14]The first Kindertransport was organised and masterminded by Florence Nankivell. She spent a week in Berlin, hassled by the Nazi police, organising the children. The train left Berlin on 1 December 1938, and arrived in Harwich on 2 December with 196 children. Most were from a Berlin Jewish orphanage burned by the Nazis during the night of 9 November, and the others were from Hamburg.[27][35]The first train from Vienna left on 10 December 1938 with 600 children. This was the result of the work of Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, a Dutch organiser of Kindertransports, who had been active in this field since 1933. She went to Vienna with the purpose of negotiating with Adolf Eichmann directly, but was initially turned away. She persevered however, until finally, as she wrote in her biography, Eichmann suddenly \"gave\" her 600 children with the clear intent of overloading her and making a transport on such short notice impossible. Nevertheless, Wijsmuller-Meijer managed to send 500 of the children to Harwich, where they were accommodated in a nearby holiday camp at Dovercourt, while the remaining 100 found refuge in the Netherlands.[7][36]Many representatives went with the parties from Germany to the Netherlands, or met the parties at Liverpool Street station in London and ensured that there was someone there to receive and care for each child.[37][38][39][40] Between 1939 and 1941, 160 children without foster families were sent to the Whittingehame Farm School in East Lothian, Scotland. The Whittingehame estate was the family home of Arthur Balfour, former UK prime minister and, in 1917, author of the Balfour Declaration.[41]The RCM ran out of money at the end of August 1939, and decided it could take no more children. The last group of children left Germany on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, and two days later Britain, France, and other countries declared war on Germany. A party left Prague on 3 September 1939, but was sent back.[42]
Sculpture groups on the Kindertransport routeMarking the European route of the children\'s transport and created from personal experience,[43] Frank Meisler\'s sculpture groups show similarities but with different details.[44] The memorials show two groups of children and young people standing with their backs to each other waiting for a train. Depicted in different colours, the group of the rescued is outnumbered, as the majority of Jewish children (more than one million) perished in the Nazi death camps. 2006: Kindertransport – The Arrival at the initiative of Prince Charles there is a monument to the Kindertransporten at London\'s Liverpool Street Station, where the children from Hook of Holland arrived.
2008: Children\'s Transport Monument. Züge ins Leben – Züge in den Tod: 1938–1939 (Trains to life – trains to death) at Berlin Friedrichstraße station for the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children, who travelled from here to London. The monument was unveiled on 30 November 2008.
2009: Kindertransport – Die Abreise (The Departure). At the request of the mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, Frank Meisler designed another group of children\'s sculptures in May 2009, in memory of 124 departing children.
2011: Crossing Channel to life. Monument to the 10,000 Jewish children who travelled from Hook of Holland to Harwich. The newspaper De Rotterdammer of 11 November 1938 is depicted next to the sitting boy, with the messages The admission of German Jewish children and Thousands of Jews must leave Germany.
2015: Kindertransport – Der letzte Abschied (The last farewell), at Hamburg Dammtor station.In September 2022 a bronze memorial entitled Safe Haven was unveiled on Harwich Quay by Dame Steve Shirley, a former Kindertransport child.[45] The work by artist Ian Wolter is a life-size, bronze sculpture of five Kindertransport refugees descending a ship’s gangplank. Each child is portrayed with a different emotion representing the storm of emotions they must have felt at the end of their journey by train and then ship. The figures are also engraved with quotes of four of the refugees describing their first experience of the UK. The memorial is within sight of the landing place at Parkeston Quay of thousands of Kindertransport children. Kindertransport – The Arrival, Liverpool Street station, London
Kindertransport – The Arrival, Liverpool Street station, London
Züge ins Leben – Züge in den Tod: 1938–1939 - Trains to Life – Trains to Death, Friedrichstraße station, Berlin
Züge ins Leben – Züge in den Tod: 1938–1939 - Trains to Life – Trains to Death, Friedrichstraße station, Berlin
Die Abreise - The departure in front of Gdańsk Główny station
Die Abreise - The departure in front of Gdańsk Główny station
Kindertransport Monument Hoek van Holland Channel Crossing to Life, Hook of Holland
Kindertransport Monument Hoek van Holland Channel Crossing to Life, Hook of Holland
Kindertransport – Der letzte Abschied - The final parting, Hamburg Dammtor station
Kindertransport – Der letzte Abschied - The final parting, Hamburg Dammtor station
Harwich memorial Safe Haven by Ian Wolter
Harwich memorial Safe Haven by Ian WolterHabonim hostelsA number of members of Habonim, a Jewish youth movement inclined to socialism and Zionism, were instrumental in running the country hostels of South West England. These members of Habonim were held back from going to live on kibbutz by the war.[46]
RecordsRecords for many of the children who arrived in the UK through the Kindertransports are maintained by World Jewish Relief through its Jewish Refugees Committee.[15]
RecoveryAt the end of the war, there were great difficulties in Britain as children from the Kindertransport tried to reunite with their families. Agencies were flooded with requests from children seeking to find their parents, or any surviving member of their family. Some of the children were able to reunite with their families, often travelling to far-off countries in order to do so. Others discovered that their parents had not survived the war. In her novel about the Kindertransport titled The Children of Willesden Lane, Mona Golabek describes how often the children who had no families left were forced to leave the homes that they had gained during the war in boarding houses in order to make room for younger children flooding the country.[47]
Nicholas WintonBefore Christmas 1938, Nicholas Winton, a 29-year-old British stockbroker of German-Jewish origin, travelled to Prague to help a friend involved in Jewish refugee work.[48] Under the loose direction of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, headed by Doreen Warriner, Winton spent three weeks in Prague compiling a list of children in Czechoslovakia, mostly Jewish, who were refugees from Nazi Germany. He then went back to Britain with the objective of fulfilling the legal requirements to bring the children to Britain and to find homes for them. Trevor Chadwick remained behind to head the children\'s programme in Czechoslovakia.[49][50] Winton\'s mother also worked with him to place the children in homes, and later hostels, with a team of sponsors from groups like Maidenhead Rotary Club and Rugby Refugee Committee.[42][51] Throughout the summer, he placed advertisements seeking British families to take them in. A total of 669 children were evacuated from Czechoslovakia to Britain in 1939 through the work of Chadwick, Warriner, Beatrice Wellington, Quaker volunteers, and others who worked in Czechoslovakia while Winton was in Britain. The last group of children, which left Prague on 3 September 1939, was turned back because the Nazis had invaded Poland – the beginning of the Second World War.[42][52]The work of the BCRC in Czechoslovakia was little noted until 1988 when the refugee children held a reunion. By that time most of the people who had worked in the kindertransport in Czechoslovakia had died and Winton became the living symbol of British help to refugees fleeing the Nazis, especially Jewish refugees, before the Second World War.[53]
Wilfrid IsraelWilfrid Israel (1899–1943) was a key figure in the rescue of Jews from Germany and occupied Europe. He warned the British government, through Lord Samuel, of the impending Kristallnacht in November 1938. Through a British agent, Frank Foley, passport officer at the Berlin consulate, he kept British intelligence informed of Nazi activities. Speaking on behalf of the Reichsvertretung (the German Jewish communal organisation) and the Hilfsverein (the self-help body), he urged a plan of rescue on the Foreign Office and helped British Quakers to visit Jewish communities across Germany to prove to the British government that Jewish parents were indeed prepared to part with their children.[54]
Rabbi Solomon SchonfeldRabbi Solomon Schonfeld brought in 300 children who practised Orthodox Judaism, under auspices of the Chief Rabbi\'s Religious Emergency Council. He housed many of them in his London home for a while. During the Blitz he found for them in the countryside often non-Jewish foster homes. In order to assure the children follow Jewish dietary laws (Kashrut), he instructed them to say to the foster parents that they are fish-eating vegetarians. He also saved large numbers of Jews with South American protection papers. He brought over to England several thousand young people, rabbis, teachers, ritual slaughterers, and other religious functionaries.[55]
Internment and war service
Memorial to Nicholas Winton at Prague Central StationIn June 1940, Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, ordered the internment of all male 16-to 70-year-old refugees from enemy countries – so-called \'friendly enemy aliens\'. A complete history of this internment episode is given in the book Collar the Lot!.[56]Many of the children who had arrived in earlier years were now young men, and so they were also interned. Approximately 1,000 of these prior-kinder were interned in these internment camps, many on the Isle of Man. Around 400 were transported overseas to Canada and Australia (see HMT Dunera).The fast, unescorted liner, SS Arandora Star was sunk by German submarine U-47 on 2 July 1940. Many of her 1213 German, Italian, and Austrian refugees, and internees (she was also carrying 86 German POWs) were ex-Kindertransport children. There was difficulty launching the lifeboats, and as a result, 805 people died out of the original complement of 1673. This led to evacuations of British children on passenger liners under the Children\'s Overseas Reception Board and the United States Committee for the Care of European Children to be protected by convoys.[citation needed]As the camp internees reached the age of 18, they were offered the chance to do war work or to enter the Army Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. About 1,000 German and Austrian prior-kinder who reached adulthood went on to serve in the British armed forces, including in combat units. Several dozen joined elite formations such as the Special Forces, where their language skills were put to good use during the Normandy landings, and afterwards as the Allies progressed into Germany. One of these was Peter Masters, who wrote a book which he titled Striking Back.[57]Most of the interned \'friendly enemy aliens\' were refugees who had fled Hitler and Nazism, and nearly all were Jewish.[citation needed] When Churchill\'s internment policy became known, there was a debate in Parliament. Many speeches expressed horror at the idea of interning refugees, and a vote overwhelmingly instructed the Government to \"undo\" the internment.[56]
United Kingdom and the United States
Main article: One Thousand ChildrenIn contrast to the Kindertransport, where the British Government waived immigration visa requirements, these OTC children received no United States government visa immigration assistance. The U.S. government made it difficult for refugees to get entrance visas.[58] However, from 1933 to 1945, the United States accepted about 200,000 refugees fleeing Nazism, more than any other country. Most of the refugees were Jewish.[59]In 1939 Senator Robert F. Wagner and Rep. Edith Rogers proposed the Wagner-Rogers Bill in the United States Congress. This bill was to admit 20,000 unaccompanied refugees under the age of 14 into the United States from Germany and areas under German control. Most of the child refugees would have been Jewish. However, due to opposition from Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, it never left the committee stage and failed to get Congressional approval.[60]
Notable people saved
Alf Dubs
Walter Kohn
Ruth WestheimerA number of children saved by the Kindertransports went on to become prominent figures in public life, with two (Walter Kohn, Arno Penzias) becoming Nobel Prize winners. These include: Benjamin Abeles (from Czechoslovakia), physicist
Yosef Alon (from Czechoslovakia), Israeli military officer and fighter pilot who served as air and naval attaché to the United States, assassinated under suspicious circumstances in Maryland in 1973.
Alfred Bader (from Austria), Canadian chemist, businessman, and philanthropist
Ruth Barnett MBE (from Germany), British writer
Leslie Brent MBE (from Germany), British immunologist
Julius Carlebach (from Germany), British sociologist, historian and rabbi
Paul Moritz Cohn (from Germany), British mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society
Rolf Decker (from Germany), American professional, Olympic, and international footballer
Alfred Dubs, Baron Dubs (from Czechoslovakia), British politician
Susan Einzig (from Germany), British book illustrator and art teacher
Hedy Epstein (from Germany), American political activist
Rose Evansky (from Germany), British hairdresser
Walter Feit (from Austria), American mathematician
John Grenville (from Germany), British historian
Hanus J. Grosz (from Czechoslovakia), American psychiatrist & neurologist
Karl W. Gruenberg (from Austria), British mathematician
Heini Halberstam (from Czechoslovakia), British mathematician
Geoffrey Hartman (from Germany), American literary critic
Eva Hesse (from Germany), American artist
Sir Peter Hirsch HonFRMS FRS (from Germany), British metallurgist
David Hurst (from Germany), actor
Otto Hutter (from Austria), British physiologist
Robert L. Kahn (from Germany), American professor of German studies and poet
Helmut Kallmann (from Germany), Canadian musicologist and librarian
Walter Kaufmann (from Germany), Australian and German author
Peter Kinley (from Vienna), born Peter Schwarz in 1926, British artist
Walter Kohn (from Austria), American physicist and Nobel laureate
Renata Laxova (from Czechoslovakia), American geneticist
Gerda Mayer (from Czechoslovakia), British poet
Frank Meisler (from Danzig), Israeli architect and sculptor
Gustav Metzger (from Germany), artist and political activist resident in Britain and stateless by choice
Isi Metzstein OBE (from Germany), British architect
Ruth Morley, nee Birnholz (from Austria), American costume designer for film and theater, created the Annie Hall look
Otto Newman (from Austria), British sociologist
Arno Penzias (from Germany), American physicist and Nobel laureate
Hella Pick CBE (from Austria), British journalist
Sidney Pollard (from Austria), British economic and labour historian
Sir Erich Reich (from Austria), British entrepreneur
Karel Reisz (from Czechoslovakia), British film director
Lily Renée Wilhelm (from Austria), American comic book pioneer[61] (graphic novelist, illustrator)[62]
Wolfgang Rindler (from Austria), British/American physicist prominent in the field of general relativity
Paul Ritter (from Czechoslovakia), architect, planner and author
Michael Roemer (from Germany), film director, producer and writer
Dr. Fred Rosner (from Germany), Professor of medicine and medical ethicist
Joe Schlesinger, CM (from Czechoslovakia), Canadian journalist and author
Hans Schwarz (from Austria), artist
Lore Segal (from Austria), American novelist, translator, teacher, and author of children\'s books, whose adult book Other People\'s Houses describes her own knocked-from-house-to-house experiences
Robert A. Shaw (b. Schlesinger, Vienna) British, professor of chemistry
Dame Stephanie Steve Shirley CH, DBE, FREng (from Germany), British businesswoman and philanthropist
Michael Steinberg, (from Breslau, Germany—now Wrocław, Poland), American music critic
Sir Guenter Treitel QC FBA (from Germany), British law scholar
Marion Walter (from Germany), American mathematics educator
Hanuš Weber (from Czechoslovakia), Swedish TV producer
Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss (from Czechoslovakia), Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem
Peter Wegner (from Austria), American computer scientist.[63]
Ruth Westheimer (born Karola Siegel, 1928; known as \"Dr. Ruth\") (from Germany), German-American sex therapist, talk show host, author, professor, and former Haganah sniper.[64][65][66]
Herbert Wise (from Austria), British theatre and television director.[67]
George Wolf (from Austria), American professor of physiological chemistry
Astrid Zydower MBE (from Germany), British sculptorPost-war organisationsIn 1989, Bertha Leverton [de], who escaped Germany via Kindertransport, organised the Reunion of Kindertransport, a 50th-anniversary gathering of kindertransportees in London in June 1989. This was a first, with over 1,200 people, kindertransportees and their families, attending from all over the world. Several came from the east coast of the US and wondered whether they could organise something similar in the U.S. They founded the Kindertransport Association in 1991.[68]The Kindertransport Association is a national American not-for-profit organisation whose goal is to unite these child Holocaust refugees and their descendants. The association shares their stories, honours those who made the Kindertransport possible, and supports charitable work that aids children in need. The Kindertransport Association declared 2 December 2013, the 75th anniversary of the day the first Kindertransport arrived in England, as World Kindertransport Day.In the United Kingdom, the Association of Jewish Refugees houses a special interest group called the Kindertransport Organisation.[69]
The Kindertransport programme in media
Documentary films The Hostel (1990), a two-part BBC documentary, narrated by Andrew Sachs. It documented the lives of 25 people who fled the Nazi regime, 50 years on from when they met for the first time as children in 1939, at the Carlton Hotel in Manningham, Bradford.[70]
My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports (1996; released theatrically in 1998), narrated by Joanne Woodward.[71] It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.[72] It was directed by Melissa Hacker, daughter of costume designer Ruth Morley, who was a Kindertransport child. Melissa Hacker has been influential in organizing the kinder who now live in America. She was also involved in working to arrange the award of 2,500 euros from the German Government to each of the kinder.
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000), narrated by Judi Dench and winner of the 2001 Academy Award for best feature documentary. It was produced by Deborah Oppenheimer, daughter of a Kindertransport child,[73] and written and directed by three-time Oscar winner Mark Jonathan Harris. This film shows the Kindertransport in personal terms by presenting the actual stories through in-depth interviews with several individual kinder, rescuers Norbert Wollheim and Nicholas Winton, a foster mother who took in a child, a Dunera survivor and later British Army sergeant Abrascha Gorbulski and later Alexander Gordon, and a mother who lived to be reunited with daughter Lore Segal. It was shown in cinemas around the world, including in Britain, the United States, Austria, Germany, and Israel, at the United Nations, and on HBO and PBS. A companion book with the same title expands upon the film.
The Children Who Cheated the Nazis (2000), a Channel 4 documentary film. It was narrated by Richard Attenborough, directed by Sue Read, and produced by Jim Goulding. Attenborough\'s parents were among those who responded to the appeal for families to foster the refugee children; they took in two girls.
Nicky\'s Family (2011), a Czech documentary film. It includes an appearance by Nicholas Winton.
The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel (2017), an Israeli documentary film by Yonatan Nir. It proposes that Wilfrid Israel played a significant part in the initiation of the Kindertransport. Seven men and women from different countries and backgrounds tell the stories, of the days before and when they boarded the Kindertransport trains in Germany.Feature films One Life, a 2023 British biographical drama film directed by James Hawes. It is based on the true story of British banker, stockbroker and humanitarian Nicholas Winton as he looks back and reminisces about his past involvement and efforts to help Jewish children in German-occupied Czechoslovakia to escape in 1938-39.Plays Kindertransport: The Play (1993), a play by Diane Samuels. It examines the life, during the war and afterwards, of a Kindertransport child. It presents the confusions and traumas that arose for many kinder, before and after they were fully integrated into their British foster homes. And, as importantly, their confusion and trauma when their real parents reappeared in their lives; or more likely and tragically, when they learned that their real parents were dead. There is also a companion book by the same name.
The End Of Everything Ever (2005), a play for children by the New International Encounter group, which follows the story of a child sent from Czechoslovakia to London by train.[74]Books I Came Alone: the Stories of the Kindertransports (1990, The Book Guild Ltd) edited by Bertha Leverton and Shmuel Lowensohn, a collective non-fiction description by 180 of the children of their journey fleeing to England from December 1938 to September 1939 unaccompanied by their parents, to find refuge from Nazi persecution.
And the Policeman Smiled: 10,000 children escape from Nazi Europe (1990, Bloomsbury Publishing) by Barry Turner, relates the tales of those who organised the Kindertransporte, the families who took them in and the experiences of the children.
Austerlitz (2001), by the German-British novelist W. G. Sebald, is an odyssey of a Kindertransport boy brought up in a Welsh manse who later traces his origins to Prague and then goes back there. He finds someone who knew his mother, and he retraces his journey by train.
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000, Bloomsbury Publishing), by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, with a preface by Richard Attenborough and historical introduction by David Cesarani. Companion book to the Oscar-winning documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport with expanded stories from the film and additional interviews not included in the film.
Sisterland (2004), a young adult novel by Linda Newbery, concerns a Kindertransport child, Sarah Reubens, who is now a grandmother; 16-year-old Hilly uncovers the secret her grandmother has kept hidden for years. This novel was shortlisted for the 2003 Carnegie Medal.[75]
My Family for the War (2013), a young adult novel by Anne C. Voorhoeve, recounts the story of Franziska Mangold, a 10-year-old Christian girl of Jewish ancestry who goes on the Kindertransport to live with an Orthodox British family.
Far to Go (2012), a novel by Alison Pick, a Canadian writer and descendant of European Jews, is the story of a Sudetenland Jewish family who flee to Prague and use bribery to secure a place for their 6-year-old son aboard one of Nicholas Winton\'s transports.
The English German Girl (2011), a novel by British writer Jake Wallis Simons, a fictional account of a 15-year-old Jewish girl from Berlin who is brought to England via the Kindertransport operation.
The Children of Willesden Lane (2017), a historical novel for young adults by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, about the Kindertransport, told through the perspective of Lisa Jura, mother of Mona Golabek.
The Last Train to London (2020), a fictionalised account of the activities of Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer by Meg Waite Clayton, also published in Dutch as De laatste trein naar de vrijheid.
Escape from Berlin (2013), a novel by Irene N. Watts, is a fictional account of two Jewish girls, Marianne Kohn and Sophie Mandel, who fled Berlin through the Kindertransport.The following list of chief rabbis of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth gives information regarding the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue, which is represented through the mainstream majority Orthodox community of the United Kingdom (as the oldest and original denomination), and various other Orthodox communities located within the Commonwealth of Nations. The Chief Rabbi\'s full title is the \"Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth\", previously \"... of the British Empire\". His title and position has historically, since 1758, been considered to be the Orthodox Jewish community in Britain\'s equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury.[1]
List
№ Image Name Term Title Notes Reason for termination
1 Aaron Hart 1704 – 1756 Rabbi of the Great Synagogue Died in office
2 Hart Lyon 1758 – 1764 Rabbi of the Great Synagogue Resigned
3 Tevele Schiff 1765 – 1766 Chief Rabbi Rabbi appointed by
the Great Synagogue
4 Meshullam Solomon 1765 – 1780 Chief Rabbi Appointed in opposition
by Hambro and the
New Synagogues;
return to Hamburg
confirmed the primacy
of David Tevele Schiff
5 Tevele Schiff 1780 – 1791 Chief Rabbi Died in office
1791 – 1802 Post vacant
6 Solomon Hirschell 1802 – 1842 Chief Rabbi Died in office
7 Nathan Marcus Adler 1845 – 1890 Chief Rabbi
8 Hermann Adler 1891 – 1911 Chief Rabbi Appointed
delegate Chief Rabbi
in 1879 due to failing
health of his father
9 Joseph Hertz 1913 – 1946 Chief Rabbi Died in office
10 Israel Brodie 1948 – 1965 Chief Rabbi Retired
11 Immanuel Jakobovits 1966 – 1991 Chief Rabbi knighted 1981
life peer 1988 Retired
12 Jonathan Sacks 1991 – 2013 Chief Rabbi knighted 2005
life peer 2009 Retired
13 Ephraim Mirvis 2013 – present Chief Rabbi knighted 2023 Currently serThe Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe\'s Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these other groups.The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of \"living space\", and seized power in early 1933. Meant to force all German Jews regardless of means to attempt to emigrate, the regime passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged harassment, and orchestrated a nationwide pogrom in November 1938. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, occupation authorities began to establish ghettos to segregate Jews. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot by German forces and local collaborators.Later in 1941 or early 1942, the highest levels of the German government decided to murder all Jews in Europe. Victims were deported by rail to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were killed with poison gas. Other Jews continued to be employed in forced labor camps where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or being used as test subjects in deadly medical experiments. Although many Jews tried to escape, surviving in hiding was difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation. The property, homes, and jobs belonging to murdered Jews were redistributed to the German occupiers and other non-Jews. Although the majority of Holocaust victims died in 1942, the killing continued at a lower rate until the end of the war in May 1945.Many Jewish survivors emigrated outside of Europe after the war. A few Holocaust perpetrators faced criminal trials. Billions of dollars in reparations have been paid, although falling short of the Jews\' losses. The Holocaust has also been commemorated in museums, memorials, and culture. It has become central to Western historical consciousness as a symbol of the ultimate human evil.
Terminology and scope
Main article: Names of the HolocaustThe term Holocaust, derived from a Greek word meaning \"burnt offering\",[1] has become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English and many other languages.[a] The term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of other groups that the Nazis targeted,[b] especially those targeted on a biological basis, in particular the Roma and Sinti, as well as Soviet prisoners of war and Polish and Soviet civilians.[2][3][4] All of these groups, however, were targeted for different reasons.[5] By the 1970s, the adjective Jewish was dropped as redundant and Holocaust, now capitalized, became the default term for the destruction of European Jews.[6] The Hebrew word Shoah (\"catastrophic destruction\") exclusively refers to Jewish victims.[7][8][2] The perpetrators used the phrase \"Final Solution\" as a euphemism for their genocide of Jews.[9]
Background
A postcard of a river with buildings behind it
View of the Pegnitz River (c. 1900) with the Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg, destroyed in 1938 during the November pogromsJews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years.[10] Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus.[11][12] In the nineteenth century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate.[13] By the early twentieth century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society, while in eastern Europe, where emancipation had arrived later, many Jews still lived in small towns, spoke Yiddish, and practiced Orthodox Judaism.[14] Political antisemitism positing the existence of a Jewish question and usually an international Jewish conspiracy emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century due to the rise of nationalism in Europe and industrialization that increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews.[15][16] Some scientists began to categorize humans into different races and argued that there was a life or death struggle between them.[17] Many racists argued that Jews were a separate racial group alien to Europe.[18][19]The turn of the twentieth century saw a major effort to establish a German colonial empire overseas, leading to the Herero and Nama genocide and subsequent racial apartheid regime in South West Africa.[20][21] World War I (1914–1918) intensified nationalist and racist sentiments in Germany and other European countries.[22] Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by widespread pogroms.[23] Germany had two million war dead and lost a substantial territory;[22] opposition to the postwar settlement united Germans across the political spectrum.[24][25] The military promoted the untrue but compelling idea that, rather than being defeated on the battlefield, Germany had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews.[24][26]
see caption
1919 Austrian postcard showing a Jew stabbing a German Army soldier in the backThe Nazi Party was founded in the wake of the war,[27] and its ideology is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust.[28] From the beginning, the Nazis—not unlike other nation-states in Europe—dreamed of a world without Jews, whom they identified as \"the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity\".[5] The Nazis defined the German nation as a racial community unbounded by Germany\'s physical borders[29] and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements.[24][30] The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, were also obsessed with reversing Germany\'s territorial losses and acquiring additional Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe for colonization.[31][32] These ideas appealed to many Germans.[33] The Nazis promised to protect European civilization from the Soviet threat.[34] Hitler believed that Jews controlled the Soviet Union, as well as the Western powers, and were plotting to destroy Germany.[35][36][37]
Rise of Nazi Germany
see caption
Territorial expansion of Germany from 1933 to 1941Amidst a worldwide economic depression and political fragmentation, the Nazi Party rapidly increased its support, reaching a high of 37 percent in mid-1932 elections,[38][39] by campaigning on issues such as anticommunism and economic recovery.[40][41] Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 in a backroom deal supported by right-wing politicians.[38] Within months, all other political parties were banned, the regime seized control of the media,[42] tens of thousands of political opponents—especially communists—were arrested, and a system of camps for extrajudicial imprisonment was set up.[43] The Nazi regime cracked down on crime and social outsiders—such as Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, and those perceived as workshy—through a variety of measures, including imprisonment in concentration camps.[44] The Nazis forcibly sterilized 400,000 people and subjected others to forced abortions for real or supposed hereditary illnesses.[45][46][47]Although the Nazis sought to control every aspect of public and private life,[48] Nazi repression was directed almost entirely against groups perceived as outside the national community. Most Germans had little to fear provided they did not oppose the new regime.[49][50] The new regime built popular support through economic growth, which partly occurred through state-led measures such as rearmament.[42] The annexations of Austria (1938), Sudetenland (1938), and Bohemia and Moravia (1939) also increased the Nazis\' popular support.[51] Germans were inundated with propaganda both against Jews[42] and other groups targeted by the Nazis.[46]
Persecution of Jews
Main article: The Holocaust in Germany
Further information: Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi GermanyThe roughly 500,000 German Jews made up less than 1 percent of the country\'s population in 1933. They were wealthier on average than other Germans and largely assimilated, although a minority were recent immigrants from eastern Europe.[52][53][54] Various German government agencies, Nazi Party organizations, and local authorities instituted about 1,500 anti-Jewish laws.[55] In 1933, Jews were banned or restricted from several professions and the civil service.[51] After hounding the German Jews out of public life by the end of 1934, the regime passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935.[56] The laws reserved full citizenship rights for those of \"German or related blood\", restricted Jews\' economic activity, and criminalized new marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans.[57][58] Jews were defined as those with three or four Jewish grandparents; many of those with partial Jewish descent were classified as Mischlinge, with varying rights.[59] The regime also sought to segregate Jews with a view to their ultimate disappearance from the country.[56] Jewish students were gradually forced out of the school system. Some municipalities enacted restrictions governing where Jews were allowed to live or conduct business.[60] In 1938 and 1939, Jews were barred from additional occupations, and their businesses were expropriated to force them out of the economy.[58]
A building that has been ransacked with debris strewn around
View of the old synagogue in Aachen after its destruction during KristallnachtAnti-Jewish violence, largely locally organized by members of Nazi Party institutions, took primarily non-lethal forms from 1933 to 1939.[61] Jewish stores, especially in rural areas, were often boycotted or vandalized.[62] As a result of local and popular pressure, many small towns became entirely free of Jews and as many as a third of Jewish businesses may have been forced to close.[63] Anti-Jewish violence was even worse in areas annexed by Nazi Germany.[64] On 9–10 November 1938, the Nazis organized Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a nationwide pogrom. Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) were looted, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged or destroyed,[65] at least 90 Jews were murdered,[66] and as many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested,[67][68] although many were released within weeks.[69] German Jews were levied a special tax that raised more than 1 billion Reichsmarks (RM).[70][c]The Nazi government wanted to force all Jews to leave Germany.[73] By the end of 1939, most Jews who could emigrate had already done so; those who remained behind were disproportionately elderly, poor, or female and could not obtain a visa.[74] The plurality, around 110,000, left for the United States, while smaller numbers emigrated to South America, Shanghai, Mandatory Palestine, and South Africa.[75] Germany collected emigration taxes of nearly 1 billion RM,[c] mostly from Jews.[76] The policy of forced emigration continued into 1940.[77]Besides Germany, a significant number of other European countries abandoned democracy for some kind of authoritarian or fascist rule.[34] Many countries, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, passed antisemitic legislation in the 1930s and 1940s.[78] In October 1938, Germany deported many Polish Jews in response to a Polish law that enabled the revocation of citizenship for Polish Jews living abroad.[79][80]
Start of World War II
A large crowd of people with swastika banners
Danzigers rallying for Hitler, shortly after the free city\'s annexation into GermanyThe German Wehrmacht (armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from the United Kingdom and France.[81] During the five weeks of fighting, as many as 16,000 civilians, hostages, and prisoners of war may have been shot by the German invaders;[82] there was also a great deal of looting.[83] Special units known as Einsatzgruppen followed the army to eliminate any possible resistance.[84] Around 50,000 Polish and Polish Jewish leaders and intellectuals were arrested or executed.[85][86] The Auschwitz concentration camp was established to hold those members of the Polish intelligentsia not killed in the purges.[87] Around 400,000 Poles were expelled from the Wartheland in western Poland to the General Governorate occupation zone from 1939 to 1941, and the area was resettled by ethnic Germans from eastern Europe.[88]The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September pursuant to the German–Soviet pact.[89] The Soviet Union deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to the Soviet interior, including as many as 260,000 Jews who largely survived the war.[90][91] Although most Jews were not communists, some accepted positions in the Soviet administration, contributing to a pre-existing perception among many non-Jews that Soviet rule was a Jewish conspiracy.[92] In 1940, Germany invaded much of western Europe including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Denmark and Norway.[81] In 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece.[81] Some of these new holdings were fully or partially annexed into Germany while others were placed under civilian or military rule.[82]The war provided cover for \"Aktion T4\", the murder of around 70,000 institutionalized Germans with mental or physical disabilities at specialized killing centers using poison gas.[88][93][94] The victims included all 4,000 to 5,000 institutionalized Jews.[95] Despite efforts to maintain secrecy, knowledge of the killings leaked out and Hitler ordered a halt to the centralized killing program in August 1941.[96][97][98] Decentralized killings via denial of medical care, starvation, and poisoning caused an additional 120,000 deaths by the end of the war.[97][99] Many of the same personnel and technologies were later used for the mass murder of Jews.[100][101]
Ghettoization and resettlement
Further information: The Holocaust in Poland
People and buildings with an unpaved street
Unpaved street in the Frysztak Ghetto, Krakow District
People walking on a paved surface around a still body
A body lying in the street of the Warsaw Ghetto in the General GovernorateGermany gained control of 1.7 million Jews in Poland.[54][102] The Nazis tried to concentrate Jews in the Lublin District of the General Governorate. 45,000 Jews were deported by November and left to fend for themselves, causing many deaths.[103] Deportations stopped in early 1940 due to the opposition of Hans Frank, the leader of the General Governorate, who did not want his fiefdom to become a dumping ground for unwanted Jews.[104][105] After the conquest of France, the Nazis considered deporting Jews to French Madagascar, but this proved impossible.[106][107] The Nazis planned that harsh conditions in these areas would kill many Jews.[106][105] In September 1939, around 7,000 Jews were killed, alongside thousands of Poles, however, they were not systematically targeted as they would be later, and open mass killings would subside until June of 1941.[108]During the invasion, synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews fled or were expelled into the Soviet occupation zone.[109] Various anti-Jewish regulations were soon issued. In October 1939, adult Jews in the General Governorate were required to perform forced labor.[110] In November 1939 they were ordered to wear white armbands.[111] Laws decreed the seizure of most Jewish property and the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses. When Jews were forced into ghettos, they lost their homes and belongings.[110]The first Nazi ghettos were established in the Wartheland and General Governorate in 1939 and 1940 on the initiative of local German administrators.[112][113] The largest ghettos, such as Warsaw and Łódź, were established in existing residential neighborhoods and closed by fences or walls. In many smaller ghettos, Jews were forced into poor neighborhoods but with no fence.[114] Forced labor programs provided subsistence to many ghetto inhabitants, and in some cases protected them from deportation. Workshops and factories were operated inside some ghettos, while in other cases Jews left the ghetto to work outside it.[115] Because the ghettos were not segregated by sex some family life continued.[116] A Jewish community leadership (Judenrat) exercised some authority and tried to sustain the Jewish community while following German demands. As a survival strategy, many tried to make the ghettos useful to the occupiers as a labor reserve.[117][118] Jews in western Europe were not forced into ghettos but faced discriminatory laws and confiscation of property.[119][120][121]Rape and sexual exploitation of Jewish and non-Jewish women in eastern Europe was common.[122]
Invasion of the Soviet UnionGermany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Italy invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.[123][105] Although the war was launched more for strategic than ideological reasons,[124] what Hitler saw as an apocalyptic battle against the forces of Jewish Bolshevism[125] was to be carried out as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war.[126][127] A quick victory was expected[128] and was planned to be followed by a massive demographic engineering project to remove 31 million people and replace them with German settlers.[129] To increase the speed of conquest the Germans planned to feed their army by looting, exporting additional food to Germany, and to terrorize the local inhabitants with preventative killings.[130][131] The Germans foresaw that the invasion would cause a food shortfall and planned the mass starvation of Soviet cities and some rural areas.[132][133][134] Although the starvation policy was less successful than planners hoped,[135] the residents of some cities, particularly in Ukraine, and besieged Leningrad, as well as the Jewish ghettos, endured human-made famine, during which millions of people died of starvation.[136][137]By mid-June 1941, about 30,000 Jews had died, 20,000 of whom had starved to death in the ghettos.[138]
Public execution of Masha Bruskina, a Belarusian Jew who helped Soviet prisoners escapeSoviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Army were intended to die in large numbers. Sixty percent—3.3 million people—died, primarily of starvation,[139][140] making them the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing after European Jews.[141][142] Jewish prisoners of war and commissars were systematically executed.[143][144] About a million civilians were killed by the Nazis during anti-partisan warfare, including more than 300,000 in Belarus.[145][146] From 1942 onwards, the Germans and their allies targeted villages suspected of supporting the partisans, burning them and killing or expelling their inhabitants.[147] During these operations, nearby small ghettos were liquidated and their inhabitants shot.[148] By 1943, anti-partisan operations aimed for the depopulation of large areas of Belarus.[149][150] Jews and those unfit for work were typically shot on the spot with others deported.[148][151] Although most of those killed were not Jews,[146][149] anti-partisan warfare often led to the deaths of Jews.[152]
Mass shootings of Jews
Further information: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union and The Holocaust in Romania
Half naked woman running, and a man carrying a bat
At least 3,000 Jews were killed during the 1941 Lviv pogroms, mainly by local Ukrainians.[153]The systematic murder of Jews began in the Soviet Union in 1941.[154] During the invasion, many Jews were conscripted into the Red Army. Out of 10 or 15 million Soviet civilians who fled eastwards to the Soviet interior, 1.6 million were Jews.[155][117] Local inhabitants killed as many as 50,000 Jews in pogroms in Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine, and the Romanian borderlands.[156][157] Although German forces tried to incite pogroms, their role in causing violence is controversial.[158][159] Romanian soldiers killed tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa by April 1942.[160][161]Prior to the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen were reorganized in preparation for mass killings and instructed to shoot Soviet officials and Jewish state and party employees.[162] The shootings were justified on the basis of Jews\' supposed central role in supporting the communist system, but it was not initially envisioned to kill all Soviet Jews.[163][164] The occupiers relied on locals to identify Jews to be targeted.[165] The first German mass killings targeted adult male Jews who had worked as civil servants or in jobs requiring education. Tens of thousands were shot by the end of July. The vast majority of civilian victims were Jews.[160] In July and August Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS (Schutzstaffel), made several visits to the death squads\' zones of operation, relaying orders to kill more Jews.[166] At this time, the killers began to murder Jewish women and children too.[166][167] Executions peaked at 40,000 a month in Lithuania in August and September and in October and November reached their height in Belarus.[168]
Men rounded up and walking
Original Nazi propaganda caption: \"Too bad even for a bullet... The Jews shown here were shot at once.\" 28 June 1941 in Rozhanka, Belarus
Men execute at least four Soviet civilians kneeling by the side of a mass grave
Shooting from behind became popular because killers did not have to look at their victims\' faces and the dead were likely to fall into the grave.[169]The executions often took place a few kilometers from a town. Victims were rounded up and marched to the execution site, forced to undress, and shot into previously dug pits.[170] The favored technique was a shot in the back of the neck with a single bullet.[171] In the chaos, many victims were not killed by the gunfire but instead buried alive. Typically, the pits would be guarded after the execution but sometimes a few victims managed to escape afterwards.[170] Executions were public spectacles and the victims\' property was looted both by the occupiers and local inhabitants.[172] Around 200 ghettos were established in the occupied Soviet Union, with many existing only briefly before their inhabitants were executed. A few large ghettos such as Vilna, Kovno, Riga, Białystok, and Lwów lasted into 1943 because they became centers of production.[117]Victims of mass shootings included Jews deported from elsewhere.[173] Besides Germany, Romania killed the largest number of Jews.[174][175] Romania deported about 154,000–170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to ghettos in Transnistria from 1941 to 1943.[176] Jews from Transnistria were also imprisoned in these ghettos, where the total death toll may have reached 160,000.[177] Hungary expelled thousands of Carpathian Ruthenian and foreign Jews in 1941, who were shortly thereafter shot in Ukraine.[178][179] At the beginning of September, all German Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and in October, Hitler decided to deport them to the east and ban emigration.[180][181] Between mid-October and the end of 1941, 42,000 Jews from Germany and its annexed territories and 5,000 Romani people from Austria were deported to Łódź, Kovno, Riga, and Minsk.[182][183] In late November, 5,000 German Jews were shot outside of Kovno and another 1,000 near Riga, but Himmler ordered an end to such massacres and some in the senior Nazi leadership voiced doubts about killing German Jews.[173][184] Executions of German Jews in the Baltics resumed in early 1942.[185]After the expansion of killings to target the entire Soviet Jewish population, the 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen proved insufficient and Himmler mobilized 21 battalions of Order Police to assist them.[166] In addition, Wehrmacht soldiers, Waffen-SS brigades, and local auxiliaries shot many Jews.[170][186][187] By the end of 1941, more than 80 percent of the Jews in central Ukraine, eastern Belarus, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been shot, but less than 25 percent of those living farther west where 900,000 remained alive.[188] By the end of the war, around 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot[189] and as many as 225,000 Roma.[190] The murderers found the executions distressing and logistically inconvenient, which influenced the decision to switch to other methods of killing.[191]
Systematic deportations across EuropeMost historians agree that Hitler issued an explicit order to kill all Jews across Europe,[192] but there is disagreement when.[193][194] Some historians cite inflammatory statements by Hitler and other Nazi leaders as well as the concurrent mass shootings of Serbian Jews, plans for extermination camps in Poland, and the beginning of the deportation of German Jews as indicative of the final decision having been made before December 1941.[193][195] Others argue that these policies were initiatives by local leaders and that the final decision was made later.[193] On 5 December 1941, the Soviet Union launched its first major counteroffensive. On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.[196][197] The next day, he told leading Nazi party officials, referring to his 1939 prophecy, \"The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.\"[197][198]It took the Nazis several months after this to organize a continent-wide genocide.[197] Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. This high-level meeting was intended to coordinate anti-Jewish policy.[199] The majority of Holocaust killings were carried out in 1942, with it being the peak of the genocide, as over 3 million Jews were murdered, with 20 or 25 percent of Holocaust victims dying before early 1942 and the same number surviving by the end of the year.[200][201]
Extermination camps
Main article: Extermination camp
Deportation to ChełmnoGas vans developed from those used to kill mental patients since 1939 were assigned to the Einsatzgruppen and first used in November 1941; victims were forced into the van and killed with engine exhaust.[202] The first extermination camp was Chełmno in the Wartheland, established on the initiative of the local civil administrator Arthur Greiser with Himmler\'s approval; it began operations in December 1941 using gas vans.[203][204][205] In October 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader of Lublin Odilo Globocnik[206] began work planning Belzec—the first purpose-built extermination camp to feature stationary gas chambers using carbon monoxide based on the previous Aktion T4 programme[207][208]—amid increasing talk among German administrators in Poland of large-scale murder of Jews in the General Governorate.[209][203] In late 1941 in East Upper Silesia, Jews in forced-labor camps operated by the Schmelt Organization deemed \"unfit for work\" began to be sent in groups to Auschwitz where they were murdered.[210][211] In early 1942, Zyklon B became the preferred killing method in extermination camps[212] after gassing experiments were conducted on Russian POWs in late August 1941.[213][208]The camps were located on rail lines to make it easier to transport Jews to their deaths, but in remote places to avoid notice.[206] The stench caused by mass killing operations was noticeable to anyone nearby.[214] Except in the deportations from western and central Europe, people were typically deported to the camps in overcrowded cattle cars. As many as 150 people were forced into a single boxcar. Many died en route, partly because of the low priority accorded to these transports.[215][216] Shortage of rail transport sometimes led to postponement or cancellation of deportations.[217] Upon arrival, the victims were robbed of their remaining possessions, forced to undress, had their hair cut, and were chased into the gas chamber.[218] Death from the gas was agonizing and could take as long as 30 minutes.[219][197] The gas chambers were primitive and sometimes malfunctioned. Some prisoners were shot because the gas chambers were not functioning.[220] At other extermination camps, nearly everyone on a transport was killed on arrival, but at Auschwitz around 20–25 percent were separated out for labor,[221] although many of these prisoners died later on[222] through starvation, mass shooting, torture,[223] and medical experiments.[224]Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka reported a combined revenue of RM 178.7 million from belongings stolen from their victims, far exceeding costs.[225][226] Combined, the camps required the labor of less than 3,000 Jewish prisoners, 1,000 Trawniki men (largely Ukrainian auxiliaries), and very few German guards.[227][216] About half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died by poison gas.[228] Thousands of Romani people were also murdered in the extermination camps.[229] Prisoner uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor meant that these camps were shut down earlier than envisioned.[230][231]
Major extermination camps[232] Camp Location Number of Jews killed Killing technology Planning began Mass gassing duration
Chełmno Wartheland[232] 150,000[232] Gas vans[232] July 1941[232] 8 December 1941 – April 1943 and April–July 1944[233]
Belzec Lublin District[232] 440,823–596,200[234] Stationary gas chamber, engine exhaust[232] October 1941[233] 17 March 1942 – December 1942[233]
Sobibor Lublin District[232] 170,618–238,900[234] Stationary gas chamber, engine exhaust[232] Late 1941 or March 1942[235] May 1942 – October 1942[235]
Treblinka Warsaw District[232] 780,863–951,800[234] Stationary gas chamber, engine exhaust[232] April 1942[232] 23 July 1942 – October 1943[232]
Auschwitz II–Birkenau East Upper Silesia[232] 900,000–1,000,000[232] Stationary gas chamber, hydrogen cyanide[232] September 1941
(built as POW camp)[212][232] February 1942 – October 1944[232]
Liquidation of the ghettos in Poland
Further information: Operation Reinhard
See caption
Cumulative murders of Jews from the General Governorate at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka from January 1942 to February 1943Plans to kill most of the Jews in the General Governorate were affected by various goals of the SS, military, and civil administration to reduce the amount of food consumed by Jews, enable a slight increase in rations to non-Jewish Poles, and combat the black market.[236] In March 1942, killings began in Belzec, targeting Jews from Lublin who were not capable of work. This action reportedly reduced the black market and was deemed a success to be replicated elsewhere.[237][238] By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Governorate by the end of the year for forced labor;[236] for the most part, only those working in armaments production were spared.[239] The majority of ghettos were liquidated in mass executions nearby, especially if they were not near a train station. Larger ghettos were more commonly liquidated during multiple deportations to extermination camps.[240][238] During this campaign, 1.5 million Polish Jews were murdered in the largest killing operation of the Holocaust.[241]In order to reduce resistance, the ghetto would be raided without warning, usually in the early morning, and the extent of the operation would be concealed as long as possible.[242] Trawniki men would cordon off the ghetto while the Order Police and Security Police carried out the action.[243] In addition to local non-Jewish collaborators, the Jewish councils and Jewish ghetto police were often ordered to assist with liquidation actions, although these Jews were in most cases murdered later.[244] Chaotic, capriciously executed selections determined who would be loaded onto the trains. Many Jews were shot during the action, often leaving ghettos strewn with corpses. Jewish forced laborers had to clean it up and collect any valuables from the victims.[242]
A young boy surrounded by other unarmed civilians holds his hands over his head while a man in uniform points a submachine gun in his direction
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising became significant as a symbol of Jewish resistance against the Nazis.[244]The Warsaw Ghetto was cleared between 22 July and 12 September. Of the original population of 350,000 Jews, 250,000 were killed at Treblinka, 11,000 were deported to labor camps, 10,000 were shot in the ghetto, 35,000 were allowed to remain in the ghetto after a final selection, and around 20,000 or 25,000 managed to hide in the ghetto. Misdirection efforts convinced many Jews that they could avoid deportation until it was too late.[245] During a six-week period beginning in August, 300,000 Jews from the Radom District were sent to Treblinka.[246][247]At the same time as the mass killing of Jews in the General Governorate, Jews who were in ghettos to the west and east were targeted. Tens of thousands of Jews were deported from ghettos in the Warthegau and East Upper Silesia to Chełmno and Auschwitz.[248] 300,000 Jews—largely skilled laborers—were shot in Volhynia, Podolia, and southwestern Belarus.[249][250] Deportations and mass executions in the Bialystok District and Galicia killed many Jews.[251] Although there was practically no resistance in the General Governorate in 1942, some Soviet Jews improvised weapons, attacked those attempting to liquidate the ghetto, and set it on fire.[252] These ghetto uprisings were only undertaken when the inhabitants began to believe that their death was certain.[253] In 1943, larger uprisings in Warsaw, Białystok, and Glubokoje necessitated the use of heavy weapons.[254] The uprising in Warsaw prompted the Nazi leadership to liquidate additional ghettos and labor camps in German-occupied Poland with their inhabitants massacred, such as the Wola Massacre, or deported to extermination camps for fear of additional Jewish resistance developing.[255] Nevertheless, in early 1944, more than 70,000 Jews were performing forced labor in the General Governorate.[256]
Deportations from elsewhere
A column of people marching with luggage
Jews are deported from Würzburg, Germany to the Lublin District of the General Governorate, 25 April 1942.Unlike the killing areas in the east, the deportation from elsewhere in Europe was centrally organized from Berlin, although it depended on the outcome of negotiations with allied governments and popular responses to deportation.[201] Beginning in late 1941, local administrators responded to the deportation of Jews to their area by massacring local Jews in order to free up space in ghettos for the deportees.[257] If the deported Jews did not die of harsh conditions, they were killed later in extermination camps.[258] Jews deported to Auschwitz were initially entered into the camp; the practice of conducting selections and murdering many prisoners upon arrival began in July 1942.[259] In May and June, German and Slovak Jews deported to Lublin began to be sent directly to extermination camps.[259]In Western Europe, almost all Jewish deaths occurred after deportation.[260] The occupiers often relied on local policemen to arrest Jews, limiting the number who were deported.[261] In 1942, nearly 100,000 Jews were deported from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.[262] Only 25 percent of the Jews in France were killed;[263] most of them were either non-citizens or recent immigrants. Si Kaddour Benghabrit and Abdelkader Mesli saved hundreds of Jews by hiding them in the basements of the Grand Mosque of Paris and other resistance efforts in France.[264][265] The death rate in the Netherlands was higher than neighboring countries, which scholars have attributed to difficulty in hiding or increased collaboration of the Dutch police.[266]The German government sought the deportation of Jews from allied countries.[259][267] The first to hand over its Jewish population was Slovakia, which arrested and deported about 58,000 Jews to Poland from March to October 1942.[268][269][270] The Independent State of Croatia had already shot or killed in concentration camps the majority of its Jewish population (along with a larger number of Serbs),[271][272] and later deported several thousand Jews in 1942 and 1943.[273] Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, who were murdered at Treblinka, but declined to allow the deportation of Jews from its prewar territory.[274] Romania and Hungary did not send any Jews, which were the largest surviving populations after 1942.[275] Prior to the German occupation of Italy in September 1943, there were no serious attempt to deport Italian Jews, and Italy refused to allow the deportation of Jews in many Italian-occupied areas.[276][277] Nazi Germany did not attempt the destruction of the Finnish Jews[278] and the North African Jews living under French or Italian rule.[279]
Perpetrators and beneficiaries
Further information: Responsibility for the Holocaust
Men and women in uniform smiling and posing with musical instruments
Auschwitz SS guards and female staff auxiliaries enjoying themselves on vacation in SolahütteAn estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Germans were directly involved in killing Jews, and if one includes all those involved in the organization of extermination, the number rises to 500,000.[280] Genocide required the active and tacit consent of millions of Germans and non-Germans.[281][282] The motivation of Holocaust perpetrators varied and has led to historiographical debate.[281][283] Studies of the SS officials who organized the Holocaust have found that most had strong ideological commitment to Nazism.[284][285] In addition to ideological factors, many perpetrators were motivated by the prospect of material gain and social advancement.[286][287][288] German SS, police, and regular army units rarely had trouble finding enough men to shoot Jewish civilians, even though punishment for refusal was absent or light.[289][290]Non-German perpetrators and collaborators included Dutch, French, and Polish policemen, Romanian soldiers, foreign SS and police auxiliaries, Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans, and some civilians.[281][291][292] Some were coerced into committing violence against Jews, but others killed for entertainment, material rewards, the possibility of better treatment from the occupiers, or ideological motivations such as nationalism and anti-communism.[293][294][295] According to historian Christian Gerlach, non-Germans \"not under German command\" caused 5 to 6 percent of the Jewish deaths, and their involvement was crucial in other ways.[296]Millions of Germans and others benefited from the genocide.[281] Corruption was rampant in the SS despite the proceeds of the Holocaust being designated as state property.[297] Different German state agencies vied to receive property stolen from Jews murdered at the death camps.[298] Many workers were able to obtain better jobs vacated by murdered Jews.[299] Businessmen benefitted from eliminating their Jewish competitors or taking over Jewish-owned businesses.[300] Others took over housing and possessions that had belonged to Jews.[301] Some Poles living near the extermination camps later dug up human remains in search of valuables.[301][302] The property of deported Jews was also appropriated by Germany\'s allies and collaborating governments. Even puppet states such as Vichy France and Norway were able to successfully lay claim to Jewish property.[303] In the decades after the war, Swiss banks became notorious for harboring gold deposited by Nazis who had stolen it during the Holocaust, as well as profiting from unclaimed deposits made by Holocaust victims.[304]
Forced labor
Further information: Forced labor in Nazi Germany
People collecting refuse in a wagon
Jews of Mogilev, Belarus, forced to clean a street, July 1941
See caption
Woman with Ostarbeiter badge at work at IG-Farbenwerke in AuschwitzBeginning in 1938—especially in Germany and its annexed territories—many Jews were drafted into forced-labor camps and segregated work details. These camps were often of a temporary nature and typically overseen by civilian authorities. Initially, mortality did not increase dramatically.[305][306] After mid-1941, conditions for Jewish forced laborers drastically worsened and death rates increased; even private companies deliberately subjected workers to murderous conditions.[307] Beginning in 1941 and increasingly as time went on, Jews capable of employment were separated from others—who were usually killed.[308][309] They were typically employed in non-skilled jobs and could be replaced easily if non-Jewish workers were available, but those in skilled positions had a higher chance of survival.[310][311] Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates.[312]In mid-1943, Himmler sought to bring surviving Jewish forced laborers under the control of the SS in the concentration camp system.[313][314][d] Some of the forced-labor camps for Jews and some ghettos, such as Kovno, were designated concentration camps, while others were dissolved and surviving prisoners sent to a concentration camp.[319] Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the concentration camps.[320] Although most Holocaust victims were never imprisoned in a concentration camp, the image of these camps is a popular symbol of the Holocaust.[321]Including the Soviet prisoners of war, 13 million people were brought to Germany for forced labor.[322] The largest nationalities were Soviet and Polish[323] and they were the worst-treated groups except for Roma and Jews.[324] Soviet and Polish forced laborers endured inadequate food and medical treatment, long hours, and abuse by employers. Hundreds of thousands died.[325] Many others were forced to work for the occupiers without leaving their country of residence.[326] Some of Germany\'s allies, including Slovakia and Hungary, agreed to deport Jews to protect non-Jews from German demands for forced labor.[327] East European women were also kidnapped, via lapanka, to serve as sex slaves of German soldiers in military and camp brothels[328][329][330] despite the prohibition of relationships, including fraternization, between German and foreign workers,[331][332] which imposed the penalty of imprisonment[332] and death.[333][334]
Escape and hiding
A bunker with a bed and other supplies
A bunker where Jews attempted to hide during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
Further information: Rescue of Jews during the HolocaustGerlach estimates that 200,000 Jews survived in hiding across Europe.[335] Knowledge of German intentions was essential to take action, but many struggled to believe the news.[336] Many attempted to jump from trains or flee ghettos and camps, but successfully escaping and living in hiding was extremely difficult and often unsuccessful.[337][338][339]The support, or at least absence of active opposition, of the local population was essential but often lacking in Eastern Europe.[340] Those in hiding depended on the assistance of non-Jews.[341] Having money,[342] social connections with non-Jews, a non-Jewish appearance, perfect command of the local language, determination, and luck played a major role in determining survival.[343] Jews in hiding were hunted down with the assistance of local collaborators and rewards offered for their denunciation.[344][291][345] The death penalty was sometimes enforced on people hiding them, especially in eastern Europe.[346][347][348] Rescuers\' motivations varied on a spectrum from altruism to expecting sex or material gain; it was not uncommon for helpers to betray or murder Jews if their money ran out.[349][347][350] Gerlach argues that hundreds of thousands of Jews may have died because of rumors or denunciations, and many others never attempted to escape because of a belief it was hopeless.[351]Jews participated in resistance movements in most European countries, and often were overrepresented.[352] Jews were not always welcome, particularly in nationalist resistance groups—some of which killed Jews.[353][354] Particularly in Belarus, with its favorable geography of dense forests, many Jews joined the Soviet partisans—an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 across the Soviet Union.[355] An additional 10,000 to 13,000 Jewish non-combatants lived in family camps in Eastern European forests, of which the most well known was the Bielski partisans.[356][357]
International reactions
Main article: International response to the HolocaustThe Nazi leaders knew that their actions would bring international condemnation.[358] On 26 June 1942, BBC services in all languages publicized a report by the Jewish Social-Democratic Bund and other resistance groups and transmitted by the Polish government-in-exile, documenting the killing of 700,000 Jews in Poland. In December 1942, the Allies, then known as the United Nations, adopted a joint declaration condemning the systematic murder of Jews.[359] Most neutral countries in Europe maintained a pro-German foreign policy during the war. Nevertheless, some Jews were able to escape to neutral countries, whose policies ranged from rescue to non-action.[360]During the war the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) raised $70 million and in the years after the war it raised $300 million. This money was spent aiding emigrants and providing direct relief in the form of parcels and other assistance to Jews living under German occupation, and after the war to Holocaust survivors. The United States banned sending relief into German-occupied Europe after entering the war, but the JDC continued to do so. From 1939 to 1944, 81,000 European Jews emigrated with the JDC\'s assistance.[361]Throughout the war, no detailed photo intelligence study was carried out on any of the major concentration or extermination camps.[362] Appeals from Jewish representatives to the American and British governments to bomb rail lines leading to the camps or crematoriums was rejected, with little to no input from the War Departments of the United States or United Kingdom.[363] However, debate exists on whether a military response would have impacted on the Holocaust.[364]
Second half of the war
Continuing killings
see caption
Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, annexed by Hungary in 1938,[365] on the selection ramp at Auschwitz II in May or June 1944. Men are lined up to the right, women and children to the left. About 25 percent were selected for work and the rest gassed.[221]After German military defeats in 1943, it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war.[366][367] In early 1943, 45,000 Jews were deported from German-occupied northern Greece, primarily Salonica, to Auschwitz, where nearly all were killed.[368] After Italy switched sides in late 1943, Germany deported several thousand Jews from Italy and the former Italian occupation zones of France, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, with limited success.[369][370] Attempts to continue deportations in Western Europe after 1942 often failed because of Jews going into hiding and the increasing recalcitrance of local authorities.[371] Most Danish Jews escaped to Sweden with the help of the Danish resistance in the face of a half-hearted German deportation effort in late 1943.[372] Additional killings in 1943 and 1944 eliminated all remaining ghettos and most surviving Jews in Eastern Europe.[189] Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were shut down and destroyed.[373][374]The largest murder action after 1942 was that against the Hungarian Jews.[375] After the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, the Hungarian government cooperated closely in the deportation of 437,000 Jews in eight weeks, mostly to Auschwitz.[376][365][377] The expropriation of Jewish property was useful to achieve Hungarian economic goals and sending the Jews as forced laborers avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians.[378] Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of a last-ditch effort to increase the production of fighter aircraft.[309][379] Although the Nazis\' goal of eliminating any Jewish population from Germany had largely been achieved in 1943, it was reversed in 1944 as a result of the importation of these Jews for labor.[380]
Death marches and liberation
see caption
A mass grave at Bergen-Belsen after the camp\'s liberation, April 1945Following Allied advances, the SS deported concentration camp prisoners to camps in Germany and Austria, starting in mid-1944 from the Baltics.[381] Weak and sick prisoners were often killed in the camp and others were forced to travel by rail or on foot, usually with no or inadequate food.[382][383] Those who could not keep up were shot.[384] The evacuations were ordered partly to retain the prisoners as forced labor and partly to avoid allowing any prisoners to fall into enemy hands.[385][383] In October and November 1944, 90,000 Jews were deported from Budapest to the Austrian border.[386][387] The transfer of prisoners from Auschwitz began in mid-1944, the gas chambers were shut down and destroyed after October, and in January most of the remaining 67,000 Auschwitz prisoners were sent on a death march westwards.[384][388]In January 1945, more than 700,000 people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system, of whom as many as a third died before the end of the war.[335] At this time, most concentration camp prisoners were Soviet and Polish civilians, either arrested for real or supposed resistance or for attempting to escape forced labor.[335] The death marches led to the breakdown of supplies for the camps that continued to exist, causing additional deaths.[382] Although there was no systematic killing of Jews during the death marches,[389] around 70,000 to 100,000 Jews died in the last months of the war.[390] Many of the death march survivors ended up in other concentration camps that were liberated in 1945 during the Western Allied invasion of Germany. The liberators found piles of corpses that they had to bulldoze into mass graves.[391][392][393] Some survivors were freed there[393] and others had been liberated by the Red Army during its march westwards.[394]
Death toll
Main article: Holocaust victims
see image description
Holocaust deaths as an approximate percentage of the 1939 Jewish population:
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
LowAround six million Jews were killed.[395][396][397] Of the six million victims, most of those killed were from Eastern Europe, and with half from Poland alone.[398][399] Around 1.3 million Jews who had once lived under Nazi rule or in one of Germany\'s allies survived the war.[400] One-third of the Jewish population worldwide, and two-thirds of European Jews, had been wiped out.[401] Death rates varied widely due to a variety of factors and approached 100 percent in some areas.[402] Some reasons why survival chances varied was the availability of emigration[403] and protection from Germany\'s allies—which saved around 600,000 Jews.[404] Jewish children and the elderly faced even lower survival rates than adults.[405] It is considered to be the single largest genocide in human history.[406][407]The deadliest phase of the Holocaust was Operation Reinhard, which was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. Roughly two million Jews were killed from March 1942 to November 1943. Around 1.47 million Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the Rwandan genocide.[408] Between July to October 1942, two million Jews were murdered, including Operation Reinhard and other killings, with over three million Jews killed in 1942 alone, as stated by historian Christian Gerlach.[409] On the other hand, historian Alex J. Kay states that over two million Jews were murdered from late July to mid-November, stating that \"these three-and-a-half months were the most intense, the deadliest of the entire Holocaust\".[410] It was the fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.[411]On 3 November 1943, around 18,400 Jews were murdered at Majdanek over the course of nine hours, in what was the largest number ever killed in a death camp on a single day.[412] It was part of Operation Harvest Festival, the murder of some 43,000 Jews, the single largest massacre of Jews by German forces, occurring from 3 to 4 November 1943.[413]Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; estimated by Gerlach at 6 to 8 million, at more than 10 million by Gilbert[414] and at over 11 million by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[415] In some countries, such as Hungary, Jews were a majority of civilian deaths; in Poland, they were either a majority[416] or about half.[399] In other countries such as the Soviet Union, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, non-Jewish civilian losses outnumbered Jewish deaths.[416]
Aftermath and legacy
Main article: Aftermath of the Holocaust
Return home and emigrationAfter liberation, many Jews attempted to return home. Limited success in finding relatives, the refusal of many non-Jews to return property,[417] and violent attacks such as the Kielce pogrom convinced many survivors to leave eastern Europe.[418][393] Antisemitism was reported to increase in several countries after the war, in part due to conflicts over property restitution.[419] When the war ended, there were less than 28,000 German Jews and 60,000 non-German Jews in Germany. By 1947, the number of Jews in Germany had increased to 250,000 owing to emigration from eastern Europe allowed by the communist authorities; Jews made up around 25 percent of the population of displaced persons camps.[420] Although many survivors were in poor health, they attempted to organize self-government in these camps, including education and rehabilitation efforts.[421] Due to the reluctance of other countries to allow their immigration, many survivors remained in Germany until the establishment of Israel in 1948.[420] Others moved to the United States around 1950 due to loosened immigration restrictions.[422]
Criminal trials
Further information: Category:Holocaust trials
Rows of men sitting on benches
Defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal, November 1945Most Holocaust perpetrators were never put on trial for their crimes.[394] During and after World War II, many European countries launched widespread purges of real and perceived collaborators that affected possibly as much as 2–3 percent of the population of Europe, although most of the resulting trials did not emphasize crimes against Jews.[423] Nazi atrocities led to the United Nations\' Genocide Convention in 1948, but it was not used in Holocaust trials due to the non-retroactivity of criminal laws.[424]In 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal tried 23 Nazi leaders primarily for waging wars of aggression, which the prosecution argued was the root of Nazi criminality;[425] nevertheless, the systematic murder of Jews came to take center stage.[426] This trial and others held by the Allies in occupied Germany—the United States Army alone charged 1,676 defendants in 462 war crimes trials[427]—were widely perceived as an unjust form of political revenge by the German public.[428] West Germany later investigated 100,000 people and tried more than 6,000 defendants, mainly low-level perpetrators.[429][430] The high-level organizer Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped and tried in Israel in 1961. Instead of convicting Eichmann on the basis of documentary evidence, Israeli prosecutors asked many Holocaust survivors to testify, a strategy that increased publicity but has proven estimate that property losses to Jews of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Poland, and Hungary amounted to around 10 billion in 1944 dollars,[433] or $170 billion in 2023.[72] This estimate does not include the value of labor extracted.[434] Overall, the amount of Jewish property looted by the Nazis was about 10 percent of the total stolen from occupied countries.[434] Efforts by survivors to receive reparations for their losses began immediately after World War II. There was an additional wave of restitution efforts in the 1990s connected to the fall of Communism in eastern Europe.[435]Between 1945 and 2018, Germany paid $86.8 billion in restitution and compensation to Holocaust survivors and heirs. In 1952, West Germany negotiated an agreement to pay DM 3 billion (around $714 million) to Israel and DM 450 million (around $107 million) to the Claims Conference.[436] Germany paid pensions and other reparations for harm done to some Holocaust survivors.[437] Other countries have paid restitution for assets stolen from Jews from these countries. Most Western European countries restored some property to Jews after the war, while communist countries nationalized many formerly Jewish assets, meaning that the overall amount restored to Jews has been lower in those countries.[438][439] Poland is the only member of the European Union that never passed any restitution legislation.[440] Many restitution programs fell short of restoration of prewar assets, and in particular, large amounts of immovable property was never returned to survivors or their heirs.[441][442]
Remembrance and historiography
A memorial of many square concrete blocks
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, 2016In the decades after the war, Holocaust memory was largely confined to the survivors and their communities.[443] The popularity of Holocaust memory peaked in the 1990s after the fall of Communism, and became central to Western historical consciousness[444][445] as a symbol of the ultimate human evil.[446] Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses asserted that \"the Holocaust has gradually supplanted genocide as modernity\'s icon of evil\",[447] while political scientist Scott Straus declared that \"the Holocaust, perhaps more than any other event in the past century, represents the pinnacle of evil\".[448] The Holocaust has been described as \"perhaps the most savage and significant single crime in recorded history\" and that of the most barbaric events in the twentieth century \"the Holocaust probably ranks as the very worst\".[449] Renowned German historian Wolfgang Benz described it as the \"singularly most monstrous crime committed in the history of mankind\".[450] Holocaust education, in which its advocates argue promotes citizenship while reducing prejudice generally, became widespread at the same time.[451][452] International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated each year on 27 January, while some other countries have set a different memorial day.[453] It has been commemorated in memorials, museums, and speeches, as well as works of culture such as novels, poems, films, and plays.[454] Denial of the Holocaust is a criminal offense in some countries;[455] while denials of the Holocaust have been promoted by various Middle Eastern governments, figures and media.Although many are convinced that there are lessons or some kind of redemptive meaning to be drawn from the Holocaust, whether this is the case and what these lessons are is disputed.[456][457][451] Communist states marginalized the topic of antisemitic persecution while eliding their nationals\' collaboration with Nazism, a tendency that continued into the post-communist era.[458][459] In West Germany, a self-critical memory of the Holocaust developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and spread to some other western European countries.[460] The national memories of the Holocaust were extended to the European Union as a whole, in which Holocaust memory has provided both shared history and an emotional rationale for committing to human rights. Participation in this memory is required of countries seeking entry.[461][462] In contrast to Europe, in the United States the memory of the Holocaust tends to be more abstract and universalized.[463] Whether Holocaust memory actually promotes human rights is disputed.[451][464] In Israel, the memory of the Holocaust has been used at times to justify the use of force and violation of international human rights norms, in particular as part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[461]The Holocaust is the most well-known genocide in history, and is considered to be the single most infamous case of genocide in European history as well.[465] It is the single most documented and studied genocide in history.[466][467] It is also seen as the archetype of genocide and the benchmark in genocide studies.[468][469]The scholarly literature on the Holocaust is massive, encompassing thousands of books.[470] The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique or incomprehensible event continues to be popular among the broader public after being largely rejected by historians.[471][472][473] Scholar Omer Bartov points out how the Holocaust was unique in that it was \"the industrial killing of millions of human beings in factories of death, ordered by a modern state, organized by a conscientious bureaucracy, and supported by a law-aoffering, patriotic \"civilized\" society.\"[474] Another debate concerns whether the Holocaust emerged from Western civilization or was an aberration of it.[475]The Jewish population still remains below pre-Holocaust levels. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, the world Jewish population reached 15.2 million by the end of 2020 – approximately 1.4 million less than on the eve of the Holocaust in 1939, when the number was 16.6 million.[476]
NotesBartov 2023a, pp. 18–19, \"Much of this debate curiously boils down to a very specific historical question, namely, did the Nazis target the Jews for genocide in a manner that was essentially different from their treatment of any other group under their rule? [...] There can be little doubt that the Jews played a singular role in the Nazi imaginaire and that German Jewish policies distinguished them within the Nazi universe of murder and fantasy; but other groups clearly have been similarly targeted in other genocides [...] \'the extent of the \'final solution\' was ... shaped by an antisemitism that was colored by a different element over and above the racism and ethno-nationalism that explains the murder of other groups by Nazi Germany—that element being the view of \'the Jews\' as an implacable, collective world enemy.\' To be sure, this makes the Holocaust unique only within the context of the Nazi empire ...\"; Smith 2023, p. 36, \"The Holocaust is particular to Jews and yet has had increasing relevance for those who do not identify as Jewish. ... All Jews everywhere were to be murdered because of their racial heritage was \'put into state policy\' on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee conference (Bazyler 2017, 29). Witness to the genocide of the Jews is a uniquely Jewish experience, because only Jews were targeted by that policy, even if other groups were targeted for genocide under other policies. The Nazi regime committed genocide against the Roma and Sinti, governed by separate policies. They also committed war crimes against Soviet Prisoners of War under other policies. So too the mass murder of disabled and the mentally ill had their own policies. The Nazis committed multiple genocides and crimes against humanity, at the same time, sometimes in the same place, governed by different laws, policies, and practices. It is not correct to say that there were many victim types during \'the Holocaust,\' if by \'the Holocaust\' we mean the genocide of the Jews.\"; Stone 2023, Introduction: What is the Holocaust?, \"This is why the focus here is on the Jews. Roma, the disabled, Soviet POWs, homosexuals and other groups were victims of the Nazis, and it is entirely legitimate to study their fate alongside one another. But using the term \'Holocaust\' to encompass all of these groups with the aim of being inclusive and not prioritizing one group\'s suffering, actually does a disservice to groups other than Jews. For the Nazis persecuted these groups for different reasons, reasons we fail to appreciate if we collapse them all together.\"; Engel 2021, pp. 3 (\"This book is about an encounter between two sets of human beings: on one hand, the people who acted on behalf of the German state, its agencies, or its almost 66 million citizens between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945; on the other, the more than 9 million Jews ...\") and 5 (\"Those discoveries about the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews made that encounter stand out in the minds of many from other instances of Nazi persecution and encouraged observers to assign it its own special name.\"); Jackson 2021, pp. 199–200, \"The Nazis killed some people almost exclusively due to their supposed genetic inferiority (the mentally and physically handicapped, Slavs, Roma); they killed others almost exclusively due to their perceived cultural decadence (communists, democrats, modernist authors and artists); but only the Jews were indicted on both grounds simultaneously and with equal vigor. ... This is not to say that Roma, communists, and others were not hated and murdered by the Nazis, but it is to note that the Jews were unique in being despised and assaulted in every dimension of their identity, corporeal and psychic.\"; Sahlstrom 2021, p. 291, \"the established understanding of the Holocaust today as the genocide of six million Jews\"; Bartrop 2019, p. 50, \"Given this, it must always be remembered that the Holocaust was a premeditated action by the Nazis to permanently eradicate a Jewish presence in Europe. Others—the disabled, Roma, Poles and other Slavs, Jehovah\'s Witnesses, homosexuals, dissenting clergy, communists, socialists, \"asocials,\" and political opponents of all sorts—were also persecuted and in many cases murdered in huge numbers; however, it was the campaign against the Jews that was the ideological \"ground zero\" for Nazi racial ideology. Others besides Jews were murdered, often on a genocidal scale, and should be remembered and acknowledged: but it was only the Jews who were all to be killed as part of a calculated policy of genocide.\"; Beorn 2018, p. 4, \"I will use the term \'Holocaust\' to refer mainly to the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews of Europe; however, I will also use the more inclusive term \'Nazi genocidal project\' to capture the larger murderous vision of which the Jews were such a large part. This includes Sinti/Roma (gypsies), the handicapped, political \'enemies,\' Soviet prisoners of war, and—particularly in the East—entire ethnic groups such as the Slavs. One cannot understand the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without placing it in the context of this larger Nazi genocidal project that foresaw murder and demographic engineering on a colossal scale.\"; Cesarani 2016, p. xxxix, \"This book deals with the fate of the Jews, not of \'other victims\' of Nazi political repression and racial-biological policies. Several other groups endured social exclusion, incarceration in concentration camps, and mass murder. However, the rationale for the persecution of these groups differed radically from the intentions that underlay anti-Jewish policy. Even though homosexual men and women, Germans of African descent, and the severely mentally and physically disabled were all disparaged in Nazi racial thinking, and depicted as a threat to the strength and purity of the Volk, only the Jews were characterized as an implacable, powerful, global enemy that had to be fought at every turn and finally eliminated.\"; Hayes 2015, p. xiii, \"This book also reflects another of its editor\'s convictions: the Holocaust was National Socialist Germany\'s assault on the Jews of Europe. Nazism attacked many groups, but none for the same reason that it attacked the Jews, none with the same urgency, and none to the same extent.\"; Hayes & Roth 2010, p. 2, \"Other groups—for example, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and Slavs—were swept up in the maelstrom of the Holocaust, but not for the same reasons as Jews and not with the same consequences ... In none of these cases, however, was the target group considered dangerous or coherent enough to warrant complete or immediate extirpation. This circumstance constitutes a significant difference from policies pursued toward the Jews, a difference that helps to clarify and define the Holocaust itself.\"; Stone 2010, pp. 1–2, \"For the purpose of this book, the Holocaust is understood as the genocide of the Jews ... \'Holocaust\', then, refers to the genocide of the Jews, which by no means excludes an understanding that other groups—notably Romanies and Slavs—were victims of genocide.\"; Bloxham 2009, p. 1, \"Between 5,100,000 and 6,200,000 Jews were murdered during the Second World War, an episode the Nazis called the \'final solution of the Jewish question\'. The world today knows it as the Holocaust.\"; Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 45 (\"The Holocaust is commonly defined as the mass murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans during World War II. Not everyone finds this a fully satisfactory definition.\") and 51 (\"the traditional view that it was the genocide of the Jews alone\")
King 2023, pp. 26–27, \"Rather than one big thing, the Holocaust might now be described as an array of event categories. In Christopher Browning\'s terms, the Holocaust involved three separate \"clusters of genocidal projects\": euthanasia and \"racial purification\" directed against the disabled and Sinti and Roma (at the time referred to collectively as \"Gypsies\") within the Third Reich; the eradication of Slavic populations living in countries east of Germany; and the Final Solution proper—that is, the attempted mass murder of every Jew residing anywhere within Germany\'s sphere of influence (Browning 2010, 407). (The list of persecuted categories—people targeted by the Nazis in ways short of genocide—would of course be longer.)\"; Engel 2021, p. 6, \"Echoing this view, some have contended that the expression \'the Holocaust\' ought to refer not only to the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews but also to \'the horrors that Poles, other Slavs, and Gypsies endured at the hands of the Nazis\' (Lukas, 1986: 220). Others have extended the term to encompass the Third Reich\'s treatment of homosexuals, the mentally ill or infrm, and Jehovah\'s Witnesses, speaking of 11 or 12 million victims of the Holocaust, half of whom were Jews. Still others have employed the word \'holocaust\' also when referring to cases of mass murder not perpetrated by the Third Reich.\"; Kay 2021, pp. 1–2, \"For perhaps the first time, all major victim groups where the death tolls reached at least into the tens of thousands will be considered together: Jewish and non-Jewish ... it makes a great deal of sense to consider the different strands of Nazi mass killing together rather than in isolation from one another. This of course means going against the grain of most scholarship on the subject by examining the genocide of the European Jews alongside other Nazi mass-murder campaigns.\"; Gerlach 2016, pp. 14–15, \"There are a number of words I will try to avoid because of the serious misconceptions they might lead to. The terms \'Holocaust\' and \'Shoah\' are not useful since neither has any analytical value. \'Holocaust\' (derived from the Greek holókauton, or burned sacrifice) has a religious connotation unbefitting of the event it is supposed to refer to, and users of this term may mean by it either the persecution and murder of Jews alone, or Nazi German violence against any group more generally ... Importantly, \'Holocaust\' and \'Shoah\' have also been criticized as \'teleological and anachronistic\' terms that convey a retrospective view that makes complex processes appear \'as a single event.\'\"; Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, p. 51, \"The authors of this volume have adopted the third approach to a working definition: The Holocaust—that is, Nazi genocide—was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity. This applied to Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped. This section also makes it clear that other definitions are defended by scholars who deserve a respectful hearing.\"
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💥🐱 THUNDERCATS #110 MARVEL UK 1990 SCARCE LOW PRINT RUN HTF SNARF LION-O TYGRA $88.20
💗🐼 CARE BEARS #45 MARVEL COMICS UK 1986 GIANT PANDA ISSUE SCARCE HTF FINE- 5.5 $32.40
💗🐻 CARE BEARS #88 MARVEL COMICS UK 1987 SCARCE LITTLE MERMAID ISSUE Fine- 5.5 $34.20
Planet Comics #5 (1951, Locker) UK Edition Super Scarce $250.00
Weird War Tales 97 NM- Scarce UK Price variant 2nd Appearance Creature Commandos $25.56
❄️🐻 CARE BEARS #11 MARVEL COMICS UK 1985 CHRISTMAS ISSUE SCARCE HTF Mid-Grade $29.70
💗🐻 CARE BEARS #161 MARVEL COMICS UK 1989 VALENTINE'S DAY ISSUE Fine 6.0 SCARCE $39.60
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