Holocaust remembrance
- See also: European history
The Holocaust was a campaign of deportation, forced labour and mass murder during World War II, carried out by Germany's Nazi regime and several other Axis states. Among the victims were Jews; Roma people; Slavs, especially Poles, Serbs and Soviet prisoners of war; homosexuals; political opponents; and people with disabilities. About 6 million Jews were killed, along with at least 5 million people of other ethnic origins.
Though the Nazis and their allies tried to destroy the death camps at the end of the war, the remnants function as museums and monuments of this dark period of Europe's modern history. As of the 2020s, the few remaining Holocaust survivors are getting old and the very last perpetrators are facing justice, emphasizing the importance of continuing to educate people about the Holocaust.
| World War II travel topics: China • Pacific • Africa • Europe • Holocaust |
Understand
| “ | Tell it to your children, and let your children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation. |
” |
—Bible, Book of Joel, 1:3 | ||
The Holocaust was a complex series of events, with roots in Europe's long history of racism and antisemitism. Political prisoners and other perceived enemies of the state were rounded up in concentration camps starting in 1933, shortly after Hitler's rise to power. The Nuremberg Laws, introduced in 1935, stripped Jews of many of their civil rights. Organized mass murder started in 1941, and on January 20, 1942, the notorious Wannsee Conference took place, in which Nazi officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the "final solution" (Endlösung) to the "Jewish question" (Judenfrage).
While the mass murder was planned by the Nazi government and most of the killing was done by German soldiers and SS, some occupied countries and allies of the Nazis also contributed in the killings and in some cases (such as the Ustase in Croatia) actually went farther or targeted other groups than the Nazis did. While some people helped Jews and other persecuted people escape, often risking their own lives and safety and those of their families, the overwhelming majority ignored the killings, and some even collaborated with the Nazis, making the acts of resistance and human decency all the more laudable and celebrated to this day, both in the countries where they happened and in Israel. In the context of the mass murder of the European Jews, the Hebrew word Shoah (meaning "catastrophe") is frequently used and is preferred by some people, as the term Holocaust originally meant a sacrificial burnt offering at an altar of a temple.
As the war ended in 1945, the camps were liberated by Allied forces. They found the camps to be filled with diseases like typhus, typhoid, and cholera, and starving emaciated people. As punishment, the Allies made nearby Germans view the camps, to show them what happened with their permission right next door to their homes. Some of the surviving Nazi leaders were held responsible in a series of criminal trials in Nuremberg. While they were also tried for war crimes, participation in the Holocaust brought the most attention and the harshest punishments. As the Allied governments, and later West Germany and the reunified Germany, have tried and imprisoned perpetrators of the Holocaust well into the 21st century, they have established a precedent of international law. Most of the surviving Jews would flee Europe following their liberation and settle in Israel or the United States. While the Holocaust was neither the first nor the last genocide in world history, it is arguably the most thoroughly documented and researched crime against humanity.
Sites
The Holocaust was carried out in most Axis-occupied territory in Europe, with a few exceptions, such as Denmark (where almost the entire Jewish population were helped to escape and those who couldn't to stay alive), Finland and Albania. Even Jews in North Africa were rounded up for murder.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, they started setting up prison camps around Germany (which included what is today western Poland), first for political prisoners and later for Jews and other people considered undesirable. As the camp system evolved into a mass murder campaign, extermination camps were set up, most of them in Poland. In the Soviet Union, much of the killing took place in the field, without camps. See below for details about the Holocaust in each country.
Aside from the camps and other sites in Europe, there are Holocaust museums and monuments around the world, including in Israel, the United States, Germany and France.
- 1 Sydney Jewish Museum, Darlinghurst, ☏ +61 2 9360 7999, admin@sjm.com.au. The museum documents the Holocaust and explores the history of the Jewish people worldwide and also in Australia.
Austria's role in the war, and the Holocaust, is a bit complicated. While Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938 and ceased to exist as a nation, many high-ranked Nazis, including Hitler himself, were Austrians. In addition, during that period, most Austrians considered themselves to be Germans and supported the annexation, with a distinct Austrian national identity only developing in the second half of the twentieth century after World War II ended.
As an alternative of Austria's compulsory military service, young Austrians have the option to work with a memorial service instead in order to inform the public about the horrors of the war.
- 2 Ebensee. A labour camp with harsh conditions.
- 3 Mauthausen-Gusen (In Upper Austria, east of Linz). A labour camp, mostly for Soviet and Polish prisoners
- 4 Shanghai Ghetto (Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees), Shanghai/Hongkou. Home to many Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust during World War II. While they were spared from the fate of the gas chamber or forced labour that their compatriots remaining in Nazi-occupied Europe had to go through, the occupying Japanese placed heavy restrictions on the Jews. Conditions in the ghetto were appalling, and many of these refugees died of various diseases as a result. The former Ohel Moshe Synagogue has been converted to a museum commemorating the Jewish refugees who lived here.
- 5 Jasenovac (near Sisak, Central Croatia). Known as Auschwitz of the Balkans, a concentration and extermination camp operated by the Ustaše regime ("Independent State of Croatia", a puppet of Nazi Germany). Around 100,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews and anti-fascist Croats and Bosnian Muslims were murdered here. This may have contributed to the ethnic violence of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
- 6 Theresienstadt (Terezín). This camp is in the Sudetenland, which was annexed by Germany in 1938. It could be described as a "showcase" concentration camp, built to make the internment look better than it actually was. The camp was mainly a temporary holding place for Jews before deportation to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
- 7 Natzweiler-Struthof (Grand Est). The only Nazi concentration camp in France, set up in the region of Alsace, considered by the Nazis to be part of Germany liberated from France, and not occupied territory. The camp had an extremely high death toll for a camp that was not intended as a death camp, due to high altitude, particularly vicious ill-treatment of inmates, and intensive pseudo-scientific human experimentation. The most notorious examples of this were the execution of over eighty Jewish prisoners, transferred from Auschwitz specifically for the purpose, to create a "historical" collection of Jewish skeletons, and experimentation with poison gases to "improve" the extermination process.
The concentration camps in Germany proper were set up before the war, for internment and forced labour of criminals and political opponents. Since these prisoners were not set up for mass murder, the camps had comparably many survivors. From 1942, many prisoners, especially Jews, were transported from these camps to extermination camps in Poland.
- 8 Bergen-Belsen (near Celle). After the war, a camp for displaced persons was set up here.
- 9 Buchenwald (near Weimar). Opened in 1937, and one of the largest camps in Germany. From 1945 to 1950, it was used as a Soviet prison camp.
- 10 Dachau (near Munich). The first concentration camp, opened in 1933, the same year as Hitler rose to power. Initially used for political prisoners.
- 11 Flossenbürg (In Upper Palatinate). Originally a camp for criminals and "antisocial" prisoners; later for Polish and Soviet prisoners.
- 12 Hadamar (near Limburg an der Lahn). An institution for T-4 Euthanasia Programme, in which people with disabilities were put to death.
- 13 Mittelbau-Dora (near Nordhausen). Slave labour camp for production of rocket weapons, including the V2.
- 14 Neuengamme (in suburban Hamburg). A slave labour camp for political prisoners. Used as a prison after the war.
- 15 Ravensbrück (near Fürstenberg, far northern Brandenburg). A women's camp.
- 16 Sachsenhausen (in Oranienburg, Brandenburg). An internment camp, mainly for political prisoners.
- 17 Wannsee.
- Nuremberg, site of the Nuremberg Party Rallies and the Nuremberg Trials
- Munich is the birthplace of the Nazi Party.
- 18 Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. Displays items such as hand-written sonnets found in the pocket of an executed resistance member and video describing the disappearance of the city's Jewish community over time as they were deported to the camps.
- 18 Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. Displays items such as hand-written sonnets found in the pocket of an executed resistance member and video describing the disappearance of the city's Jewish community over time as they were deported to the camps.
- 19 Yad Vashem. Israel's official memorial for the Holocaust victims. Located in West Jerusalem.
- 20 Chamber of the Holocaust (Cellar of the Catastrophe, מרתף השואה). A small Holocaust museum located on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
- 21 Beit Terezin (Beit Theresienstadt, Haus Theresienstadt (German), בית טרזין). Museum and a place of remembrance of the victims of the persecution at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
- 22 Ghetto Fighters' House (בית לוחמי הגטאות, Beit Lohamei Ha-Getaot), Western Galilee. The world's first museum commemorating the Holocaust and Jewish heroism.
- Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day (Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah, יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה). Israel's day of commemoration for the Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period. On the previous evening Israel goes to a shut down, and many commemoration services are held. At 10:00, a memorial siren sounds throughout the country observed with two minutes of solemn reflection. Almost everyone stops what they are doing, including motorists who stop their cars in the middle of the road, standing beside their vehicles in silence.
- 23 Chiune Sugihara Memorial Hall (杉原千畝記念館), Yaotsu. A museum dedicated to Chiune Sugihara, Japan's Ambassador to Lithuania during WWII, who issued visas to Jews fleeing German-occupied Poland. While Japan did not accept visas to stay in Japan, they could be issued for transit. Since the Dutch-owned island of Curacao did not require visas to enter, Chiune Sugihara hand-wrote hundreds of visas for transit to Curacao. With these visas, they could enter Russia to travel along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok so that they could travel by ship to Japan before moving onward to Curacao. It is said that he saved over 2,200 Jews from persecution in Europe with his visas. He continued writing these visas until Japan closed its Lithuanian consulate in late 1940. He was transferred to Romania, where he spent 18 months in a POW camp when the Soviets took control. After being released, his wife claimed that he was dismissed because of his improper visa grants in Lithuania, many of which were considered invalid, resulting in Japan having to keep the refugees until another country offered to take them.
:While Sugihara's son and family members claim that the museum exaggerates and even fabricates information for dramatic affect, as well as falsely claiming Sugihara was born in Yaotsu where the museum is located when his birth certificate states he was born in Mino, his visas and the help he provided in saving Jews from being placed in concentration camps were real. He was issued the Righteous Among the Nations award by Israel for his deeds, and around 2,000 visitors from Israel come to this out-of-the-way museum annually. This is reflected in the exhibits which are written in Japanese, English, and Hebrew. - 24 Holocaust Education Center (ホロコースト記念館), Fukuyama. The museum's founder, Makoto Otsuka, was a friend of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. He established this museum to educate Japanese people about the Holocaust, which is only a footnote in most Japanese studies of WWII. The museum features artifacts from concentration camps and accounts from survivors along with the typewriter used by Otto Frank to transcribe his daughter's famous diary.
- 27 Amersfoort. A transit camp.
- 28 Anne Frank House (Anne Frankhuis), Amsterdam/Canal District. The house where the Jewish girl Anne Frank wrote her diary while hiding with her family from the Nazis. Don't let the (usually) long line discourage you; it moves quickly and the experience inside the hiding places on the top floors is moving. The museum lacks any exhibits to explain the historical context at the time of Anne's diary, however.
- 29 Herzogenbusch, Vught, near 's-Hertogenbosch. Opened in 1943, as the earlier camps were too small.
- 30 Westerbork. A transit camp.
As Germany and the Soviet Union occupied Poland in 1939, the country ceased to exist by name, as the Nazis intended to use the land for German settlement (Lebensraum). Germany annexed the western provinces and the area around Białystok, and central Poland became the General Government, essentially a colony ruled by the Nazis. As the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the General Government was extended to most of eastern Poland. While a few Polish people were among the perpetrators, around three million Polish Jews and two million other Poles were killed in the Holocaust.
In contrast to the German prison camps, the sites in Poland were typically extermination camps (Vernichtungslager), where prisoners (mostly Jews from all parts of Europe, but also non-Jewish Poles and other perceived enemies of the German state) were sent to die, either in gas chambers, or through forced labour, weakened by starvation and epidemics. The extermination policy makes the notorious slogan Arbeit macht frei — "Work makes (you) free" which was displayed on many camp gates — a bitterly ironic statement, given that very few were ever freed from the camps and most were killed.
For the death camps, the word "camp" was a misnomer, since nearly all prisoners were killed in gas chambers on arrival; the only inhabitants were guards and Sonderkommandos — prisoners assigned for disposal of bodies. The Sonderkommandos were regularly killed and replaced; some camps had more of a dozen "generations" of them. The very few who survived were valuable as witnesses to the final stage of the Holocaust.
Some of these sites have both a German and a Polish name. By convention, the German names (Auschwitz etc) are used to describe the concentration camp, while the Polish names (Oświęcim etc) are used to describe the civilian settlements.
- 31 Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim, 60 km west of Kraków (at). The largest and most infamous, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Contained both a labour camp section and an extermination camp. More than a million prisoners died here.
- 32 Bełżec (Belzec). A death camp with a toll of nearly 500,000 Jews, and an unknown number of non-Jewish Poles and Romani. Only seven prisoners were known to survive.
- 33 Chełmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof). This was the first death camp the Nazis built in occupied Poland; starting in December, 1941, between 152,000 and 180,000 Jews along with some Romani people and non-Jewish Poles were murdered by being forced and tricked into walking through a corridor that led into the back of one of two large trucks that were rigged to fill up with exhaust and cause death by carbon monoxide poisoning. There were very few survivors. There is now a Holocaust museum and memorial in this small village.
- 34 Kraków Ghetto. Known to posterity from Schindler's List.
- 35 Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp (Obóz Koncentracyjny Kraków-Płaszów), Kraków/South. The area of the former camp is now grass fields and hills with one large stone monument commemorating the victims. Also the villa of Amon Göth, the commandant of the camp, is still standing.
- 36 Majdanek (Państowe Muzeum na Majdanku), Near Lublin. This former Nazi concentration and death camp was captured nearly intact by the Soviet Red Army, so the operation of the gas chambers and other aspects of the camp can be seen more clearly here than in any other Nazi death camp. There is debate over the number of victims here, with figures between 78,000 and several hundred thousand given by different scholars. Most victims were Jews, while many others were non-Jewish Poles, and there were prisoners from a wide variety of other nationalities. After the war, the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, used the facility to imprison and torture members of the non-communist Polish Home Army, which had fought against both Nazi and Soviet occupation, and as a transit camp for exiling some of them to Siberia.
- 37 Gross-Rosen (Rogoźnica), near Wałbrzych. Located in Lower Silesia, which was part of Germany before the war. The camp was set up in 1940 as a labour camp.
- 38 Sobibór. This was purely a death camp. At least 167,000 and possibly as many as 300,000 people were murdered there — as in other death camps, primarily Jews. Among the victims were the Sonderkommandos from the Bełżec death camp, who managed to pass notes to the Sonderkommandos at Sobibór before being shot. Once the Sobibór Sonderkommandos realized beyond doubt that they, too, would definitely be murdered once the Nazis no longer felt a need for their services, they planned a revolt. It was only partly successful as most of them were killed, but since the Sonderkommandos knew they were dead, anyway, any level of success was worth the effort. After the uprising in 1943, the Nazis demolished the camp. Nearly nothing of the actual camp remains today, though there is a museum, and recent archeology has discovered the remains of the gas chamber.
- 39 Sztutowo (Stutthof) (near Gdansk).
- 40 Treblinka, In Masovia. Between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed here, along with 2,000 Romani. As in Sobibór, there was eventually a revolt by the Sonderkommandos, and this revolt was more successful in terms of the number of survivors but did not lead to the destruction of the camp
- 41 The Warsaw Ghetto, Warsaw/Wola. The largest ghetto.
- 42 Litzmannstadt Ghetto (Łódź). The Litzmannstadt Ghetto was the second largest Jewish ghetto in Poland after the Warsaw Ghetto. It is referred to as both the Łódź Ghetto and the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, the latter name coming from the German general who captured the city in World War One (the entire city was later renamed Litzmannstadt in his honor). The ghetto was the last one to be liquidated due to the high productivity of the slave laborers and lack of armed resistance.
Sweden
In the early years of the war, Sweden made many concessions to Germany and was reluctant to receive refugees, but did accept almost the entire Danish Jewish community and some Norwegian Jews. The Holocaust became widely known partially through Swedish diplomats and journalists. In the late stages of the war, Sweden made humanitarian efforts, with Raoul Wallenberg most famous for his work saving Hungarian Jewish lives. As Sweden was one of the few European countries safe from the Holocaust, the Jewish Stockholm tour has a showcase of a surviving Jewish community.
- 43 Swedish Holocaust Museum, Torsgatan 19. Sweden's first museum dedicated to Holocaust remembrance was founded in 2022, and opened its first exhibition in 2023.
- 44 Malmö Museum (Malmö). The museum became a refugee camp at the end of the war. Today, the museum has an exhibition on this period.
Ukraine is often considered to be the place where the Holocaust started in earnest. In Ukraine, with the help of local collaborators, Jews, as well as other "undesirable" minorities like Poles, Hungarians, Russians and Roma people were rounded up and shot, then buried in pits, as gas chambers had not yet been set up at this early stage of Nazi genocide.
- 45 Babi Yar. This ravine in suburban Kyiv is the most infamous Ukrainian Holocaust site.
- 46 Janowska Camp. This camp on the outskirts of Lviv, which before World War II was part of Poland, served as a slave labour and transit camp as well as an outright murder centre, but was mainly associated with the liquidation of the Lwów (Lviv) Ghetto
- 47 Alderney. Along with the other Channel Islands, Alderney was occupied by Germany during World War II. Four concentration camps were built here, and between 400 and 40,000 people (mostly prisoners of war and civilians deported from mainland Europe) were killed over the course of the war. A few remains of one of the camps, named Lager Sylt, can be seen. Some Channel Islanders, including Jews and those who defied Nazi rule, but also an arbitrary 2,000 others as revenge against British military action, were sent to camps on the continent, of whom one was murdered in Auschwitz and at least 45 others were killed by the inhuman conditions of camps in France and Germany.
- 48 National Holocaust Museum (Beth Shalom), near Newark-on-Trent. A museum and memorial garden which often hosts talks given by survivors. Two permanent exhibitions: The Journey, suitable for all ages, is an immersive retelling of a 10-year old boy's escape from Berlin via the Kindertransport; The Holocaust Exhibition, suitable for adults and teenagers, explores the societal conditions that permit genocide by examining the Holocaust in detail.
- 49 Imperial War Museum, Lambeth, London. IWM's revamped Holocaust Galleries opened in 2022 to much fanfare. Personal objects such as photographs, letters, musical instruments, clothes and toys shine a light on some of the individual stories of the Holocaust. Beginning with normal life in the early 1930s, the exhibition charts how that life was gradually eroded beyond recognition by ever more extreme persecution and terror - at one point, the ground literally moves beneath your feet. Most of the gruesomeness of the previous exhibition has been removed, but in its place is a powerful sense of immediacy and, above all, empathy for the people with whom you come face-to-face.
The United States is home to the world's largest or second-largest Jewish community, depending on what figures you trust, and many Holocaust survivors migrated here after their liberation. Many American Jews lost family members to the Holocaust, so the topic is especially sensitive there.
- 50 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C./National Mall.
- 51 Safe Haven Holocaust Refugee Shelter Museum, Oswego, New York. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought 982 refugees from Europe, mostly Jewish, to a shelter at Fort Ontario. The first priority were those that had escaped from concentration camps. This was the only refugee camp in the US during the war, and residents had to promise they would return to their home countries. However, due to political pressure, they were resettled in the US after the war. This museum is in a 1905 guard house at Fort Ontario State Park, which also displays a tugboat used in the Normandy invasion, and other sights from centuries of American military fortifications and shipping on the Great Lakes.
Respect
While the heritage of the Holocaust, and the political and cultural forces behind it, are serious matters, they can appear very different between the countries where it happened. Especially in Germany and Austria, the events are thoroughly gone through in the school curriculum. In Poland, the government's stance is that the Polish people were victims, not perpetrators, of the Holocaust. Calling concentration camps and death camps Polish, even if they are in modern-day Poland, is illegal in Poland.
In many parts of Europe, anti-Semitism, antiziganism (bigotry against Romani/Sinti people) and other kinds of racism are common, and usually entangled with current events.
Denial of the Holocaust has been a political issue to the extent that it is criminalized in Germany and several other European countries.
Cope
Visiting Holocaust museums and sites can be emotional, upsetting, and sometimes surreal. You'll see and learn things that are difficult to grapple with, and it's hard to anticipate exactly how you'll react. You may find yourself hurrying to get away from the site as quickly as you can, morose and weary as you physically feel the weight of what you're seeing, or unexpectedly detached and distant—or some combination of these.
Given the evil nature of the crimes committed in the Holocaust, you would be forgiven for thinking the places where the crimes were perpetrated would look in some way evil too, or be in isolated locations tucked out of sight. This is not always the case, and the surroundings may often be positively mundane, and be in close proximity to roads, homes and workplaces filled with people going about their daily lives. The sun may be shining. It is this contrast between expectation and reality, or between horror and banality, that can cause you to feel strangely disoriented.
Be prepared for complicated and heavy emotions, and do not expect to just move on cheerfully to your next activity once you leave. Conversely, you may need to do just that. It is not uncommon for visitors to Holocaust sites to plan some form of relaxation or entertainment immediately afterwards in order to not be completely overwhelmed by negative emotion. Your experience at the site may weigh on you for the rest of the day and beyond.
See also
- History of justice
- March of the living
- Minority cultures of Russia
- Soviet Union
- World War II in Europe