Which groups were victims of the holocaust

Sprawled here in the prison enclosure are the burnt bodies of some of the Jewish slave laborers uncovered by the US 7th Army at Schwabmunchen, May 1, The corpse of a prisoner lies on the barbed wire fence in Leipzig-Thekla, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany. These dead victims of the Germans were removed from the Lambach concentration camp in Austria, on May 6, , by German soldiers under orders of U.

Army troops. As soon as all the bodies were removed from the camp, the Germans buried them. This camp originally held 18, people, each building housing 1, There were no beds or sanitary facilities whatsoever, and 40 to 50 prisoners died each day. A young man sits on an overturned stool next to a burnt body in the Thekla camp outside Leipzig, in April of , after the US troops entered Leipzig April On the 18th of April, the workers of the Thekla plane factory were locked in an isolated building of the factory by the Germans and burned alive by incendiary bombs.

About prisoners died. Those who managed to escape died on the barbed wire or were executed by the Hitler youth movement, according to a US captain's report. Burned bodies of political prisoners of the Germans lie strewn about the entrance to a barn at Gardelegen, Germany on April 16, where they met their death a the hands of German SS troops who set the barn on fire.

The group tried to escape and was shot by the SS troops. Of the 1, prisoners, only 12 managed to escape. Some of the skeleton-like human remains found by men of the Third Armored Division, U. First Army, at the German concentration camp at Nordhausen on April 25, , where hundreds of "slave laborers" of various nationalities lay dead and dying.

When American troops liberated prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp, Germany, in , many German SS guards were killed by the prisoners who then threw their bodies into the moat surrounding the camp. Ed Seiller of Louisville, Kentucky, stands amid a pile of Holocaust victims as he speaks to German civilians who were forced to see the grim conditions at the Landsberg concentration camp, on May 15, Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, pose in a concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria, on May 7, The camp was reputedly used for "scientific" experiments.

A Russian survivor, liberated by the 3rd Armored Division of the U. First Army, identifies a former camp guard who brutally beat prisoners on April 14, , at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia, Germany. Dead bodies piled up in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after the British troops liberated the camp on April 15, The British found 60, men, women and children dying of starvation and disease.

British guards hold rifles in the background. Citizens of Ludwigslust, Germany, inspect a nearby concentration camp under orders of the 82nd Airborne Division on May 6, Bodies of victims of German prison camps were found dumped in pits in yard, one pit containing bodies. A pile of bodies left to rot in the Bergen-Belsen camp, in Bergen, Germany, found after the camp was liberated by British forces on April 20, Some 60, civilians, most suffering from typhus, typhoid and dysentery, were dying by the hundreds daily, despite the frantic efforts by medical services rushed to the camp.

Manacled following his arrest is Joseph Kramer, commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Belsen, photographed on April 28, German SS women remove bodies of their victims from trucks in the concentration camp at Belsen, Germany, on April 28, Starvation and disease killed hundreds of the many thousands imprisoned at the camp.

British soldiers holding rifles in the background stand on the dirt which will fill the communal grave. A German SS guard, standing amid hundreds of corpses, hauls another body of a concentration camp victim into a mass grave in Belsen, Germany in April of Piles of the dead at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 30, Some , people are estimated to have died in this one camp alone.

A German mother shields the eyes of her son as they walk with other civilians past a row of exhumed bodies outside Suttrop, Germany.

The bodies were those of 57 Russians killed by German SS troops and dumped in a mass grave before the arrival of troops from the U. Ninth Army. Soldiers of the 95th Infantry division were led by informers to the massive grave on May 3, Approximately 3, Jehovah's Witnesses were incarcerated in concentration camps.

Nearly a third of them died there. Another were shot after being convicted by a military tribunal. The Nazi regime also persecuted male homosexuals for failing their duty to contribute to the expansion of the German race and for their perceived corrupting influence.

Tens of thousands of homosexuals were indicted for alleged homosexual acts or behavior: some of those who could not be convicted, or who were picked up by the Gestapo German secret state police after serving their sentences, were imprisoned in concentration camps. Hundreds, possibly thousands died in the camps. Finally, German Criminal Police officials arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps tens of thousands of so-called asocials as well as real or perceived repeat criminal offenders , even though they had not committed a new crime or violation.

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For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the s.

Americans read headlines about book burning, about Jews being attacked on the street, and about the Nuremberg Race laws in , when German Jews were stripped of their German citizenship. The Kristallnacht attacks in November were front-page news in the United States for weeks. Americans staged protests and rallies in support of German Jews, and sent petitions to the US government calling for action.

But these protests never became a sustained movement, and most Americans were still not in favor of allowing more immigrants into the United States, particularly if the immigrants were Jewish.

It was very difficult to immigrate to the United States. In , the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in order to set limits on the maximum number of immigrant visas that could be issued per year to people born in each country. Unlike today, the United States had no refugee policy, and Jews could not come as asylum seekers or migrants. Approximately ,, European Jews immigrated to the United States between , most of them between The US Government learned about the systematic killing of Jews almost as soon as it began in the Soviet Union in Yet saving Jews and others targeted for murder by the Nazi regime and its collaborators never became a priority.

As more information about Nazi mass murder reached the United States, public protests and protests within the Roosevelt administration led President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January The establishment of the War Refugee Board marked the first time the US government adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of Nazi persecution.

The War Refugee Board coordinated the work of both US and international refugee aid organizations, sending millions of dollars into German-occupied Europe for relief and rescue.

The American people—soldiers and civilians alike—made enormous sacrifices to free Europe from Nazi oppression. The United States could have done more to publicize information about Nazi atrocities, to pressure the other Allies and neutral nations to help endangered Jews, and to support resistance groups against the Nazis.

Prior to the war, the US government could have enlarged or filled its immigration quotas to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the country. These acts together might have reduced the death toll, but they would not have prevented the Holocaust. Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition for more information. Although the liberation of Nazi camps was not a primary objective of the Allied military campaign, Soviet, US, British, and Canadian troops freed prisoners from their SS guards, provided them with food and badly needed medical support, and collected evidence for war crimes trials.

The Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide. Despite this, calculating the exact numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is an impossible task. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. Historians estimate that approximately six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, including approximately 2. Although the Holocaust specifically refers to the murder of European Jews, Nazi Germany and its collaborators also killed non-Jews, including seven million Soviet citizens, three million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.

Beginning in the winter of , the governments of the Allied powers announced their intent to punish Nazi war criminals. After much debate, 24 defendants were chosen to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels could not be tried because they committed suicide at the end of the war or soon afterwards. The Nazi defendants were indicted on four charges:.

This information included the mass murder operations at Auschwitz, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the estimate of six million Jewish victims.

The trial hearings ended on September 1, On October 1, , the judges delivered their verdict. They convicted 19 of the defendants and acquitted three. The judges of the IMT sentenced twelve defendants to death.

During the five years that followed the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators were tried by other courts in Germany and in the countries that were allied to or occupied by Nazi Germany.

The Allied military authorities, which now occupied the defeated Germany, began a process of denazification. The distribution of Nazi propaganda continues to be illegal in Germany today. The Holocaust was a watershed event, not only in the 20th century but also in the entire course of human history. Studying the Holocaust reminds us that democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained, but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected.

The Holocaust was not an accident in history; it occurred because individuals, organizations, and governments made choices that not only legalized discrimination but also allowed prejudice, hatred, and ultimately mass murder to occur.

It also teaches us that silence and indifference to the suffering of others, or to the infringement of civil rights in any society, can—however unintentionally—perpetuate these problems. This resource contains more than articles about the Holocaust, antisemitism, and current-day mass atrocities in 19 languages. Access foundational lesson plans and lessons on Americans and the Holocaust, antisemitism and racism, propaganda, and more.

Learn more about why Nazi Germany and its collaborators targeted Jews and other victims of the Holocaust era. Right-wing extremists blamed the Jews. They also accused the Jews of being capitalist exploiters who profited at the expense of others. At the same time, the Jews were accused of being followers of communism who were after world domination by means of a revolution.

Yet there is no straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the Holocaust. In his book Mein Kampf and his speeches, Hitler never made a secret of his hatred of the Jews and his opinion that there was no place for them in Germany, but initially, he had no plans for mass murder.

Only after the outbreak of the Second World War did the Nazi top conceive of the idea and the possibility of murdering the European Jews. The Holocaust can, therefore, best be seen as the outcome of a series of decisions, influenced by circumstances. Sometimes the initiative came from lower placed Nazis, who were looking for extreme solutions to the problems they faced.

Competition between different government departments also led to increasingly radical measures against the Jews. But in the end, nothing went against Hitler's wishes and he was the one who made the final decisions. Between and , the Nazis made life in Germany increasingly impossible for the Jews. Jews fell victim to discrimination, exclusion, robbery, and violence. The Nazis sometimes killed Jews, but not systematically or with the intention of killing all Jews.

At that point, the main goal of the Nazis was to remove the Jews from Germany by allowing them to emigrate. To encourage them to do so, they took away their livelihoods. Jews were no longer allowed to work in certain professions. They were no longer allowed in some pubs or public parks. In , the Nuremberg Racial Laws came into force. Jews were forbidden to marry non-Jews. Jews also lost their citizenship, which officially turned them into second-class citizens with fewer rights than non-Jews.

Jewish houses, synagogues, and shops were destroyed and thousands of Jewish people were imprisoned in concentration camps. When the war broke out in September , about , Jews fled Germany because of the violence and discrimination. The German invasion of Poland in September heralded a new, more radical phase in the persecution of the Jews. The war had made emigration all but impossible. The occupation of Poland meant that 1. Several families often shared a single house.

They went hungry and lacked medical care. The Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto without permission, and they sometimes had to do forced labour. Moreover, during the first months of the occupation of Poland, the Germans executed thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

During this period, the Nazis were planning to deport the Jews from the occupied territories to reservations in Poland or to the territory of the Soviet Union after its planned conquest.

An alternative plan entailed deporting Jews to the island of Madagascar. It should be noted that the Nazi plans did not include provisions regarding their accommodation or other living facilities, although they did go into the seizure of Jewish property. This suggests that the Nazis counted on high mortality rates among the Jews. In June , Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The army command was notified that war crimes would not be punished and that they had permission to execute all criminal suspects without trial.