By the end of 1942 the Germans had already murdered millions of Jews, but there were still remaining before them many Jews, more millions, all over Europe and North Africa, whom they wanted to capture and to bring to the murder centers in order to kill them.

And they embarked on that mission during the course of 1943 and the subsequent years until the end of World War II, where the murder did not stop until the end of the war.

Auschwitz became ultimately the largest and most industrialized murder center of the entire history. Auschwitz came online fully during the course of 1943. All of the gas chambers at Birkenau, the murder center of Auschwitz-Birkenau, were online by the summer of 1943 and were now prepared to kill all these arriving Jews: Jews from Greece, Jews from Italy, and the peak – the Jews from Hungary. In the course of the spring and summer of 1944, some 437,000 Jews from Hungary were brought to Auschwitz and nearly all of them killed upon arrival, in a period of just eight weeks. Ultimately Auschwitz murdered more than a million people, nearly all of them Jews.

As the Red Army approached Auschwitz, the Germans shut down the murder operations in Auschwitz and they marched out the majority of the remaining prisoners, some 57,000 approximately, in a death march through the snow, without any provisions, shooting thousands on the way as they marched them towards Germany, and only a few thousands were remaining in the camp itself when the Soviets arrived on January 27th of 1945.

So if we come to sum up the Holocaust, we can say that the Nazis achieved some of their goals, but they did not achieve all of their goals. They murdered six million Jews, the Jews have never replenished their numerical numbers. If before the war there were between sixteen and seventeen million Jews, at the end of World War II there were fewer than eleven million. And today, at the peak of Jewish growth since World War II, there are approximately 13 million Jews in the world. They seriously damaged aspects of Jewish culture – Ladino and Yiddish and other things. They wiped out Jewish communities that have never been reconstituted, and have been essentially wiped off the map. In that sense the Nazis achieved some of their goals, but the Nazis also failed because the Jewish people are still here. The Jewish people did not win World War II, the Jewish people survived World War II, but in that survival lies the Nazi failure.

Materials are published in accordance with Yad VaShem Remembrance Centre.

As soon as Germany invaded the Soviet Union, special murder units of the SS and the German police entered and began murdering primarily Jews, and also various Communist officials and so on, but their main target was Jews.

But by the end of 1941, in that first stage, the first 6 months of murder, they had already murdered 800,000 Jews or even more. But the murder expanded gradually, beginning in the second half of the summer of 1941, with discussions inside of Nazi Germany about bringing other Jews into this picture of murder.

Because as Germany now looked around and saw they had even more millions of Jews under their rule and there was nowhere to send them, and there is no other solution, they felt themselves, ironically, trapped, and now they had to deal with the problem of so many millions of Jews.

And they determined that the only solution to the problem was to kill the problem. But it was a process to reach that decision: They began discussing including the Jews of the Third Reich in the murder, parallel to the murder in the Soviet Union. Their ally – Romania, began murdering Jews on their own in territories that Romania controlled in Romania and the Ukraine.

And particularly inside of Poland, one SS general named Odilo Globocnik began organizing plans to murder the Jews of the areas of Poland where he had influence, which included more than two million Jews, and that became, later on, what was known as “Operation Reinhardt”. Parallel to that, experiments began at the end of the summer of 1941 to design gas vehicles – lorries, or vans – into which you could load several dozen Jews, drive around for a few minutes and kill them.

They experimented with a number of prototypes until they reached the correct model, and then they
began using that model in various places, but primarily in a new camp, that was constructed in November of 1941 and opened on December 8th 1941, that was Chelmno. Parallel to that they experiment with a different kind of gas, at the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. And in early September 1941, the first experiment using Zyklon B, the prussic acid, which was a pesticide for agriculture, was being adapted, and the experiment was found to be successful enough that they then embarked upon improving on the model and looking to build gas chambers that would use that method of gassing.

Therefore we have parallel developments during the course of the second half of 1941: Massive shooting, gas vans, murder in other places, planning on bringing Jews from all over Europe into the murder areas that were being prepared, and murder by the exhaust of engines, “Operation Reinhardt” being planned by Globocnik – all of this coalesced, by the end of 1941, became the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.

Materials are published in accordance with Yad VaShem Remembrance Centre.

On September 1st 1939 Germany invaded Poland and that brought the beginning of World War II. And with the invasion of Poland, they suddenly had in their hands an additional nearly two million Jews. Months after that, they invaded Scandinavia and conquered Norway and Denmark, and then Western Europe. They conquered Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France, and with all of these conquests, by the summer of 1940, Germany found itself now not with a problem of a few hundred thousand Jews inside the Third Reich, but with a problem of several million Jews across territories they had conquered in Europe.

And they continued their pursuit of some solution to this problem. They looked for places to send the Jews. Perhaps they could create some gigantic ghetto somewhere, they thought about the Lublin area as one of those solutions – that didn’t work. Perhaps they could shove all the Jews into the Soviet Union, but that didn’t work either – the Soviet Union was not going to receive millions of Jews simply because Germany wanted to get rid of them. They thought of places that were maybe far away, they could push the Jews far, far from Europe, such as the island of Madagascar, but that too was logistically impossible.

But this pursuit of a solution was something the Nazis never left. And once they conquered Poland, and particularly for Eastern European Jews, it was a good option in that local and regional commanders of the Nazis could pursue the idea of putting Jews into ghettos as a kind of holding pen, until they could find a solution for the Jews.

Materials are published in accordance with Yad VaShem Remembrance Centre.

The Nazis began their pursuit of the Jews and looking for a solution to their problem with the Jews, what they called “The Jewish Question”, from the moment they came to power in 1933.

They looked for ways to separate the Jews from German society, and the economy and politics, civil society, and culture and in everything. They boycotted the Jews, passed laws against the Jews, disenfranchised the Jews, kicked the Jews out of citizenship, and tried to force the Jews to emigrate from the Third Reich, as a way of relieving Germany of this threat that the Nazis imagined.

The climax of all that, of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, came in November 1938, with the violent, nationally organized “Kristallnacht Pogrom”, in which thousands of Jewish stores were destroyed, homes were destroyed, more than 1,500 synagogues were burned to the ground, more than 100 Jews were murdered, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps and to prisons. And this pressure on the Jews to leave, to be separated from society, continued and pushed the Jews – indeed, many were leaving as time went on, looking for places to go.

In the course of the pre-war years, 1933 to September 1939, approximately half of the German Jews actually left Germany, some 250,000. Unfortunately for many of them, they ended up going to neighboring countries and being caught. Those who managed to get further away, of course, ended up saving their lives, although they didn’t exactly know that that was the issue when they left.

Materials are published in accordance with Yad VaShem Remembrance Centre.

Nineteen thirty-three was a critical turning point in history and in the history of the story of the Holocaust. The Nazis came to power via democratic means,and then proceeded to use the machinery of democracy to dismantle democracy, and ultimately to pursue those whom they defined as their arch enemy and the ultimate evil – and those were the Jewish people.

At the time the Nazis came to power, there were approximately 16 to 17 million Jews in the world, of whom there were about 9 million in Europe at the time, and in Germany itself, approximately half a million or slightly more than that.

According to the Nazis’ racist biological anti-semitic view of the world, the German people, who were part of the Aryan race as they defined it, were the epitome of mankind: They were the most creative, the most cultured, the best in their spirit, they contributed the most to humanity, they were the builders of culture and society. And in that view, the Jews were the exact opposite: the inverse of humanity. They were the destroyers, they were the parasites, they were the devil incarnate,
as the Nazis viewed them.

They described them as microbes or germs that destroy the human body from within, and as such, the Jews as a not quite human creature but in human form, posed to the Nazis, in their sinister power that the Nazis imagined, the greatest threat to Germany and to the world.

Materials are published in accordance with Yad VaShem Remembrance Centre.

The Holocaust was the Nazis’ attempt to murder the Jewish people, first in Europe and ultimately everywhere in the world, if they could, based on their racist, anti-semitic ideology which saw the Jews as an ultimate evil.

The project the Nazis undertook regarding the Jews began in 1933 in their search for a solution to the problem that they saw regarding the Jews, and progressed through various stages and developments, right until the end of World War II in 1945.

Materials are published in accordance with Yad VaShem Remembrance Centre.