History of the Jews during World War II

German Nazi occupied Europe

By World War II, nearly all Jewish firms had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi-German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. As the war started, large massacres of Jews took place. Pogroms (racial riots) were also encouraged by the Nazis, especially early in the war before the larger mass killings began.

The first of these pogroms was Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, often called Pogromnacht, or "night of broken glass," in which Jewish homes were ransacked in numerous German cities along with 11,000 Jewish shops, towns and villages,^[1] as civilians and SA stormtroopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; and 1,668 synagogues ransacked with 267 set on fire. In the city of Lviv, Ukrainian nationalists organized two large pogroms in July, 1941, in which around 6,000 Jews were murdered.

In Lithuania, anti-Soviet partisan groups engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms on July 25 and 26, 1941, before Nazi forces even arrived, killing about 3,800 Jews and burning synagogues and Jewish shops. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iași pogrom in Romania, in which as many as 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials.

The following figures from Lucy Dawidowicz show the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe by (pre-war) country:^[2]

Country	Estimated Pre-War Jewish population	Estimated killed	Percent killed
Poland	3,300,000	3,000,000	90
Baltic countries	253,000	228,000	90
Germany and Austria	240,000	210,000	90
Bohemia and Moravia	90,000	80,000	89
Slovakia	90,000	75,000	83
Greece	70,000	54,000	77
Netherlands	140,000	105,000	75
Hungary	650,000	450,000	70
Byelorussian SSR	375,000	245,000	65
Ukrainian SSR	1,500,000	900,000	60
Belgium	65,000	40,000	60
Yugoslavia	43,000	26,000	60
Romania	600,000	300,000	50
Norway	2,173	890	41
France	350,000	90,000	26
Bulgaria	64,000	14,000	22
Italy	40,000	8,000	20
Luxembourg	5,000	1,000	20
Russian SFSR	975,000	107,000	11
Denmark	8,000	52	<1
Total	8,861,800	5,933,900	67

By December 1941, Adolf Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). Dr. Josef Bühler urged Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the "Final Solution" in the General Government. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps: Auschwitz, Birkenau was the Extermination Camp site Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka II. Sebastian Haffner published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the United States, but that his withdrawal and apparent calm thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goal—the extermination of the Jews.

Even as the German Nazi war machine faltered in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers, and industrial resources were still being heavily diverted away from the war and towards the death camps. By the end of the war, much of the Jewish population of Europe had been killed in the Holocaust. Poland, home of the largest Jewish community in the world before the war, had over 90% of its Jewish population, or about 3,000,000 Jews, murdered by the Nazis. Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Latvia each had over 70% of their Jewish population killed.

Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia each lost around half of their Jewish populations, the Soviet Union lost over one third of its Jews, and France and Italy each saw around a quarter of their Jewish populations killed.

Spain

During the war, Spain became an unlikely haven for several thousand Jews. They were mainly from Western Europe, fleeing deportation to concentration camps from occupied France, but also Sephardic Jews from Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary. Trudy Alexy refers to the "absurdity" and "paradox of refugees fleeing the Nazis' Final Solution to seek asylum in a country where no Jews had been allowed to live openly as Jews for over four centuries." ^[3]

Jews in the Allied Forces

Servicemen of the 20th Air Force stationed in Guam during WWII participate in a Rosh Hashanah service.

During World War II, approximately 500,000 American Jews served in the various branches of the United States armed services. Roughly 52,000 of these received U.S. military awards.^[4] The historian Solomon Grayzel, in A History of the Jews: From the Babylonian Exile to the Present, records that more than a million Jews were officially enrolled in the fighting forces of the Allies and that the largest number were Jewish Americans. Jewish partisans also fought throughout occupied Europe and were organized into groups such as the Bielski partisans, United Partisan Organization and the Parczew partisans. Jewish Partisans took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Warsaw uprising and many other battles throughout the war. Approximately 200,000 Jews serving in the armed forces of the Soviet Union lost their lives during the war.

References

1. Gilbert, Martin. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction. Harper Collins, 2006, p. 30.
3. Trudy Alexy, The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot, Simon & Schuster, 1993. ISBN 0-671-77816-1. p. 74.
4. Hartwick, Sharon (December 24–30). "Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War". The Villager 73 (34). Retrieved November 28, 2010. Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links

• About the Holocaust A thematic and chronological narrative of the Holocaust with related video, photos, documents and more from Yad Vashem