Shoah
From Freepedia
Shoah or Ha Shoah (literally denoting a "catastrophic upheaval") is the Hebrew term for the genocide of two thirds of the European Jewish population during the Holocaust.
Beginnings
From Hitler's seize to power 1933 on, Jews were increasingly discriminated against, leading to the "Reichs-Kristallnacht. After the begin of World War II, more territories and terrains came under the influence of the Nazi movement, and in the Wannseekonferenz, the extermination of the Jews began.
Collaborators
Most European countries allied with or occupied by the Axis Powers collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. Collaboration took the form of either rounding up of the local Jews for deportation to the German extermination camps or a direct participation in the killings.
In Italy a law from 1938 restricted civil liberties of Jews, but after the fall of Mussolini and his creation of the Salò Republic, Jews started being deported to German camps. The deported numbered about 8,369, and only about a thousand survived. Several small camps were built in Italy and the so called Risiera di San Sabba hosted a crematorium; from 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed in San Sabba, only a part of whom were Jews.
Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from occupied Greek and Yugoslavian territories. The Vichy French government and French police in Nazi-occupied France participated in the roundups of 75,000 Jews. The Netherlands civilian administration and police participated in the roundups of 100,000 Jews. A Dutch group, Henneicke Column, hunted and "delivered" 9,000 Jews for deportation[1]. Norwegian police rounded up 750 Jews. Slovakia's Tiso regime deported approximately 60,000 Jews.[2]
The Hungarian Horthy regime deported 20,000 Jews from annexed Transcarpathian Ukraine in 1941 to Kamianets-Podilskyi in the German-occupied Ukraine, where they were shot by the German Einsatzgruppen detachments. Hungarian army and police units killed several thousand Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad in January 1942. However Horthy resisted German demands for mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, and most survived until 1944, when the Horthy fell from power and was replaced by the Arrow Cross regime. At this late date in the war with German defeat appearing likely, Hungarian police nevertheless participated fully with SS in the roundups of 440,000 Jews for deportation to the extermination camps. Moreover, 20,000 Budapest Jews were shot by the banks of the Danube by Hungarian forces. 70,000 Jews were forced on a death march to Austria—thousands were shot and thousands more died of starvation and exposure.
The Croatian Ustase regime killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs and 20,000 Jews (mostly in 1942) in the Jasenovac concentration camp near Zagreb, and deported 7,000 more to German extermination camps. The Jasenovac Memorial Area keeps a list of 59,188 names of Jasenovac victims collected by the Yugoslav authorities.
The Romanian Antonescu regime, in cooperation with German Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian auxiliaries, killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria. 54,000 Jews were killed in Bogdanovka, a Romanian concentration camp along the Bug River in Transnistria,between 21 and 31 December 1941, 39,000 in occupied Odessa and 8,000 in Iasi. The Romanians also massacred Jews in the Domanevka and Akhmetchetka concentration camps.
Ukrainian nationalists killed 4,000 Lviv Jews in July 1941, and an additional 2,000 in late July 1941 during the so-called Petliura Days pogrom. German Einsatzgruppen, together with Ukrainian auxiliary units, killed 33,000 Kievan Jews in Babi Yar in September 1941. Ukrainian auxiliaries participated in a number of killings of Jews, among them in Romanian concentration camps in Bogdanovka and in Latvia.
Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary military units with German Einsatzgruppen detachments participated in the extermination of the Jewish population in their countries (94,000 in Latvia). (source: Historical Atlas of the Holocaust, USHMM)
About 75% of Estonia's Jewish community, aware of the fate that otherwise awaited them, managed to escape to the Soviet Union; virtually all the remainder (between 950 and 1000 men, women and children) were killed by Einsatzgruppe A and local collaborators before the end of 1941. (source: Max Jakobson Commission Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity)
References
- Shoah is a documentary film by Claude Lanzmann based on some events of the Holocaust.
- The Shoah Foundation is devoted to recording the testimonies of survivors of Shoah.
- Yom HaShoah is the Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and its victims, a national day of remembrance in the State of Israel
