Important Facts About . . .

The Holocaust

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Porrajmos is the Romany term for the Holocaust and means “devouring.”
More than half a million people visit the site of the former concentration camp Auschwitz every year.
Material published in 2001 alleged that IBM, the American computer company, had developed punch card technology to make selection of Holocaust victims more efficient. A Romany organization planned to sue IBM for its role. The case was later dropped.
Between 1945 and 1985, approximately 5,000 convicted Nazi war criminals were executed and 10,000 were imprisoned.
The Holocaust gave new urgency to the Jewish quest for a homeland in the Middle East. The Yishuv, or Jewish community in Palestine, stood ready to take them, but the British who governed the region restricted immigration to keep peace with the local Arabs. On November 29, 1947, Resolution 181 was enforced. It called for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, and developed a plan for ending British rule.
In August 1945, the Allied powers created the International War Crimes Tribunal, which included judges from the U.S., Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. Never before in history had the losers of a nation at war been held to answer for their crimes before an international court.
After the Holocaust, the U.N. formed the Commission of Human Rights in June 1946. In December 1948, the Commission approved two historic agreements: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
When an injured and dying former SS man asked Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal for forgiveness for his role in wiping out the entire Jewish population in a small Ukrainian town, Wiesenthal answered with silence rather than forgiveness. Haunted by the experience, Wiesenthal asked religious leaders, human rights activists, and others to comment on his choice. He collected their response and his own essay in The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, which is now a classic of Holocaust literature.
Holocaust survivor Yehuda Bacon, who spent his early teens in concentration camps, recounted that he burst out laughing during the first funeral procession he saw after liberation. “People are crazy,” he said. “For one person they make a casket and play solemn music? A few weeks ago I saw thousands of bodies piled up to be burnt like so much junk.”
After WWII, the Allies grappled with whether to hold only the Nazi leaders accountable for the Holocaust or the whole German nation.
After the war, squads of militant Jews spread over Europe and attempted to track down and execute SS officers in hiding. A Lithuanian Jew named Abba Kovner (1918-1987) formed the Avengers, a group of former ghetto fighters and partisans. They sought revenge not just against the Nazis but the entire German nation.
After the war, the Allies felt that the German people should know the crimes committed during the Holocaust. Many citizens were forced to view bodies found at the concentration camps.
During the de-Nazification of Germany after the war, the three Western powers (U.S., Great Britain, Russia), sentenced over 3.4 million former Nazis to some type of punishment. They also revoked race laws and other repressive measures, disbanded Nazi organizations, and eliminated “racial science” instruction from school.
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) acknowledged guilt for the Holocaust and agreed to pay damages to individual Holocaust survivors. Over time, thousands of survivors qualified, and in 1954 the West German government paid out $6 million in pensions. By 1961, the total was up $100 million. The agreement made it clear that reparations did not lesson German guilt or repay Jewish suffering.
On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, sirens all over Israel sound at 10 a.m. for two minutes.
The 1991 film The Eighty-First Blow is a film about the disbelief and even hostility that many Holocaust survivors encountered after the Holocaust.

Between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps

The Nazis sent 10,000-15,000 homosexuals to concentration camps where they were forced to wear pink triangles. The Nazis also carried out pseudo-research to find if homosexuality was inherited by injecting them with male hormones. They offered homosexuals their freedom if they would agree to be castrated or submit themselves to sexual abuse and prostitution. Under these conditions, an estimated 6,000-9,000 homosexual inmates died in the camps.
The Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem (Hebrew for “Memorial [or Hand] and Name,” taken from the Biblical verse Isaiah 56:5), the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, includes the names of over 10,000 people who risked their lives to save the Jews during the Holocaust. In Hebrew, these heroes are called Hasidei Umot Haolam, or the “Righteous among Nations of the World.”
Soviet soldiers were the first to liberate the death camps. On July 23, 1944, they liberated Majdanek. Most of the world initially refused to believe the Soviet reports of the horrors they found there.
General Eisenhower ordered every citizen of the German town of Gotha to tour the concentration camp Ohrdruf (a subcamp of Buchenwald). After the mayor of the town and his wife did so, they went home and hanged themselves.
When General Eisenhower learned about the Ohrdruf concentration camp, he ordered every American soldier in the area who was not on the front lines to visit the camp. He said that if they did not know what they were fighting for, now they would know “what they were fighting against.”
At some concentration camps, selected prisoners were used for medical experimentation, including exposing the body to various conditions such high altitude, freezing temperatures, and extreme atmospheric pressure. Others underwent experiments with diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, and malaria.
While most Holocaust deniers, or “revisionists,” acknowledge that the Jews suffered during WWII, they disagree with the features that made the Holocaust a unique event in human history by denying that (1) the Holocaust was an efficient and organized program of genocide, (2) that six million Jews were murdered, and (3) that the Final Solution was a plan for the complete destruction of the Jews.
On December 17, 1941, the Western Allies publicly denounced the massacre of the Jewish people, but they failed to do anything about it.
The 1985 film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann is nine hours long and consists entirely of interviews with people who witnessed the Holocaust first hand.
In letters and documents discussing the Holocaust, the Nazis never used words as “extermination” or “killing.” Instead, they used code words such as “final solution,” “evacuation,” or “special treatment.”
Though he was offered sanctuary on the “Aryan side,” Polish teacher Janusz Korczak voluntarily left with the children from his orphanage when they were deported to extermination camps. It is believed that he died in August 1942 at the Treblinka concentration camp.
Victims at some concentration camps were injected with the bacterium that produces gas gangrene so Nazi doctors could research the effectiveness of sulfanilamide in preventing infection and mortification. Several women prisoners died or were severely burned as a result of infections caused by the treatment of high doses of sulfanilamide.
Many Jewish children who were hidden in Christian families during the Holocaust were unaware of their Jewish heritage and remained with their foster parents. Some children became so close to their foster parents that they did not want to leave to rejoin their other surviving family members.

To refute Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that the Holocaust never happened, prominent Muslims joined Jews and Christians at the former concentration camp Auschwitz in February 2011 to honor Jewish Holocaust victims.

Main Concentration Camps and Associated Deaths

Camp	Deaths
Auschwitz	2,000,000
Belzec	600,000
Bergen-Belsen	70,000
Buchenwald	56,000
Chelmno	340,000
Dachau	30,000
Flossenburg	30,000
Majdanek	1,380,000
Mauthausen	>95,000
Ravensbruck	>90,000
Sachsenhausen	100,000
Sobibor	250,000
Treblinka	800,000

Important Dates

January 30, 1933	Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany
March 22, 1933	Dachau, the first concentration camp, is opened
March 23, 1933	Enabling Act is passed, giving Hitler absolute power
September 15, 1935	First of the Nuremberg Laws is published, taking rights away from Jews and forbidding marriage between Jews and “Aryans”
November 9-10, 1938	Kristallnacht: Also known as “Night of Broken Glass,” Nazi-instigated rampage against Jewish shops in Germany and Austria ends with the arrest of over 30,000 Jews and destruction of their homes and businesses
September 1, 1939	German invasion of Poland starts WWII
January 1940	The Nazis begin a program of gassing the mentally disabled in Germany
June 14, 1940	Auschwitz concentration camp is opened in Poland as a prison for Poles and an outstation for colonization of the East
June 22, 1941	The Germans and their allies invade the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. SS units known as Einsatzgruppen are ordered to follow the advancing armies and kill all Soviet Jews
September 3, 1941	First gassings with Zyklon-B at Auschwitz
September 28-30, 1941	Over 33,000 Soviet Jews are massacred and buried in a mass grave at Babi Yar, outside Kiev, Ukraine
January 20, 1942	Wannsee Conference discusses the “Final Solution”
November 3, 1943	Operation Harvest Festival: 18,000-40,000 Jews at Majdanek concentration camp are massacred
November 29, 1944	Last gassings at Auschwitz; camp is ordered to be evacuated on January 19, 1945
January 27, 1945	Auschwitz is liberated by Russians
April 30, 1945	Hitler commits suicide in his Berlin bunker
May 5-8, 1945	Mauthausen and its satellites, the last remaining concentration camp, is liberated by the U.S.
May 8, 1945	Allies accept Germany’s unconditional surrender
November 20, 1945-October 1, 1946	War criminals are tried at Nuremberg