Holocaust

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==Footnotes==
 
==Footnotes==

Revision as of 04:27, 4 January 2009

The Holocaust was a campaign by the German Nazi Party to eliminate ethnic Jews (and other so-called "undesirables" including homosexuals, ethnic Serbs and Slavs, and Roma) from Europe. This campaign was carried out during World War II.

Contents

Origin of term

The term Holocaust came into wide usage only starting in the mid 1970s after it was popularized in writings and through the TV miniseries of the same name. It has been known in Hebrew as the Shoah since it happened in the 1940s. The term "final solution" or "Hitler's final solution" also refers to the Holocaust and was widely used before Holocaust became the best known term for it.

Methods

The Holocaust was carried out in concentration camps throughout Nazi-occupied territory during World War II. The largest and most infamous was the Auschwitz camp in Poland. It involved systematic use of gas chambers using the gas Zyklon B as the most common means of committing this mass murder of people. These camps are also sometimes called extermination camps. There were also widespread deaths in them from systematic starvation and from disease. Horrific forced medical experiments were also conducted on prisoners.

History

The Nazis began setting up concentration camps as early as 1933, such as the Dachau camp in southern Germany. At the time they were used for forced labor and imprisonment of political dissidents and other "undesirables". These camps were the site of many deaths from starvation and exhaustion, as well as disease. During this period many Jews, homosexuals, Roma and others were sent to the camps. The large-scale systematic relocation of Jews and others to the camps for mass extermination in gas chambers began about 1942 and lasted until the camps were liberated at the end of World War II. The scope and scale of this genocide once it was seen firsthand shocked even a world already weary of several years of world war.

Other participants

In Croatia the Ustaše party, which ruled under Axis protection between 1941 and 1945 carried out its own extermination campaign against ethnic Serbs and Jews in conjunction with the Nazis, doing so on their own initiative. In France, the puppet Vichy regime also actively collaborated with the Nazis in rounding up Jews. Other Axis aligned countries however (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) did not comply except in a few cases when they were compelled to by their Nazi allies.

Death Toll

Nearly 6 million Jews were killed[1], along with 2-3 million Soviet POW's,[2] 1-1.5 million political activists, .6 million Serbs, close to .5 million Roma (Gypsies),[3] .2 million Poles, 80,000-200,000 Freemasons,[4] 75,000-250,000 disabled,[5] 7,000-16,000 Spanish POW's, 5,000-15,000 gay men,[6] and 2,500-5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses. All in all, this accounts for about 12 million deaths[7] [8]

Also see

Footnotes

  1. http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/faqs/answers/faq_3.html
  2. http://www.gendercide.org/case_soviet.html
  3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1361751,00.html
  4. http://mill-valley.freemasonry.biz/persecution.htm
  5. Lifton, Robert J. The Nazi Doctors" Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. London: Papermac, 1986 (reprinted 1990) p. 142.
  6. The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International Ltd., p. 108.
  7. Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses During the Nazi-Regime 1933-1945 Social Disinterest, Governmental Disinformation, Renewed Persecution, and Now Manipulation of History? p. 251.
  8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust#Victims_and_death_toll
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