tophat will end up destroying hotcopper The Holocaust The...

tophat will end up destroying hotcopper The Holocaust

The Holocaust is the name given to the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies etc. by the Nazis during World War Two.

Hitler had made it perfectly clear in "Mein Kampf" what he thought of the so-called "untermenschen" (the sub-humans) but to most people these were the thoughts of a madman.

However, during "Krystalnacht" in 1938 the Nazis had shown their desire to persecute the Jews and in the war Hitler had the opportunity to carry out his plan to rid Europe of all undesirables (from his point of view) and he concentrated his efforts in Eastern Europe. After the attack on Russia, murder squads from the SS moved behind the army and systematically wiped out towns and villages containing Russian people (the same people who had welcomed the German Army into Russia as liberators against the Russian leader Stalin!).

However, the process was slow and the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was concerned that the men doing the evil deed were becoming demoralised shooting innocent civilians and he looked for another solution. The lead to the Final Solution decided at the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942 when it was ordered that all Jews in Europe be killed in extermination camps. With due speed, German industrialists were required to design and produce ovens and gas chambers that would enable the mass murders to be carried out quickly and cleanly without involving German personnel too much.

The most infamous camps were at Auschwitz, Belzac, Sobibor and Treblinka. Here Jews, Eastern Europeans (many of whom were also Jewish), gypsies and the physically and mentally handicapped were brought and murdered.

For many years there has been an accepted figure for the number of Jews murdered - six million. As a result of recently found evidence this figure is now being upgraded and some historians have put the figure as high as 7 to 8 million. To this day mass graves are still found in Russia of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (SS) and so the final figure may never be truly known. The gypsy community claims that 50% of all gypsies were murdered while the number of handicapped people murdered is not really known.

As the war came to a close the Nazis destroyed many of the records they held but the survivors of the extermination camps have given us an accurate portrayal of what ‘life’ was like in these hell-holes. The death camps were seen as factories which had to make profits such as extracting the gold teeth from the victims and selling it (or sending it to Switzerland which would explain the recent problems with "Nazi Gold" in banks in that country) and the camp commanders exchanged ideas on how to make their camps more efficient and therefore more profitable.

Deaths of Jews in the Holocaust

Poland
3,000,000
90% of all Jews there

Germany
210,000
90% of all Jews there

Czech.
155,000
86% of all Jews there

Holland
105,000
75% of al Jews there

Hungary
450,000
70% of all Jews there

Ukraine
900,000
60% of all Jews there

Roumania
300,000
50% of all Jews there

Russia
107,000
11% of all Jews there


Total number of European Jews killed = 6 million

Added to this must be those other groups murdered in the death camps such as gypsies, the physically disabled, the mentally disabled and those involved in resistance movements against Hitler.

Hitler decided on the fate of the Jews at a meeting in a Berlin lakeside mansion at Wannersee on January 20th 1942.

Here is an extract from the minutes of that meeting:

"In the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be brought to the east for labour. Large labour gangs will be formed, with the sexes separated, which will be used for road construction. No doubt a lot of them will drop out through natural wastage. The remainder who survive will have to be dealt with accordingly."

"Accordingly" meant the building of what were literally factories to kill people - the death camps like Auschwitz\Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka.

Each death camp had to make a profit and each camp was in competition with the others to see which could make the most. Hence why hair was shaved from the heads of victims (to use in mattresses), gold teeth were taken out etc. There was even competition to see which gas was the most effective though each death camp eventually used Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide). Each camp had to keep an accounts book that could be inspected. Jews were selected to help in the murder of other Jews before they themselves were murdered.



This is the memorial in Warsaw where tens of thousands of Jews from Warsaw were sent to the death camps. This memorial is shaped like the carriages of the cattle wagons that took these people to their deaths. The names of the families known to have died are carved on the inside of the 'wagons'.



This part of another memorial in Warsaw's Peace Park shows Polish Jews being lead off by Nazi soldiers.

To this day there is still some confusion as to the number of murders that took occurred in the death camps. The Nazis destroyed records as the Russians advanced from the east and as the war came to an end there was a rush to murder more and more and it is probable that we will never know the true figure of those murdered in these death camps. It is possible the 6 million is a conservative figure.

There is a more specific country by country beardown of Jews killed in the Holocaust. I had difficulty in aligning the columns.
pre war No: killed
Poland 3,300,000 3,000,000
Baltic Countries 253,000 228,000
Germany/Austria 240,000 210,000
Protectorate 90,000 80,000
Slovakia 90,000 75,000
Greece 70,000 54,000
The Netherlands 140,000 105,000
Hungary 650,000 450,000
SSR White Russia 375,000 245,000
SSR Ukraine* 1,500,000 900,000
Belgium 65,000 40,000
Yugoslavia 43,000 26,000
Romania 600,000 300,000
Norway 1,800 900
France 350,000 90,000
Bulgaria 64,000 14,000
Italy 40,000 8,000
Luxembourg 5,000 1,000
Russia (RSFSR)* 975,000 107,000
Denmark 8,000 ----
Finland 2,000 ----

TOTAL 8,861,800 5,933,900

*The Germans did not occupy all the territory of this republic