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This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust , including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
Some of the information relayed in the Grojanowski Report (from the extermination center at Chelmno), including an estimate of 700 thousand murdered Jews, was broadcast by the BBC on June 2nd, 1942. [2] Mention of several details from this broadcast were recycled and reported on page 5 of the New York Times near the end of that month on June 27th, 1942. [3]
A New York Times article reports on the existence and use of the gas-chambers on November 24th, 1942. [4] It significantly understates the scale of the mass-killing ongoing in the camps, though it does quote the number killed that year at 250,000 and suggests by implication that operations were continuous or otherwise had not concluded. The article appears on page 10 of that day's edition of the New York Times next to an ad for Seagram's Gin much larger than the article itself. [4] This brief mention broadcasts certain basic elements of the Racynski's note, which was not officially circulated as a brochure under the heading "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland" until several weeks later. [5]
During the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, many of the documents listed in the "Primary Documents" section above existed alongside a scattering of reports from individual camps such as Bettleheim's "Individual & Mass-Behavior in Extreme Situations"(1943) which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Early book-length works from survivors of the camps that became widely available immediately after the war include Kogon's Theory and Practice of Hell (1st published in 1946 as Der SS-Staat: Das System de Deutschen Konzentrationslager), and Rousset's Other Kingdom (1946).
The Bettleheim paper appearing in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology is a unique document, insofar as it was published while the concentration camps and extermination centers were still in operation and consisted of the testimony of a working psychiatric clinician in an attempt to report on the circumstances from the perspective of a survivor of the camps. [6] However "Individual & Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations"(1943) also represents the limitations of the early reports: Dachau and Buchenwald (where Bettleheim was imprisoned) were not, technically speaking, extermination centers (the gas-chambers were not used for mass-executions in those camps) and thus does not reflect the experience of prisoners in the death-camps in Eastern Europe but speaks to how the system operated within Germany.
Even reports that record massacres, camps and extermination centers in the East during the war such as Raczyński's Note; the Black Book of Polish Jewry (which confines its sample to Poland, and understates, for a variety of reasons, the full scope of ongoing mass-murder); [7] [8] the Black Book of Soviet Jewry (which was compiled and presented for publication during the war but not circulated until after the war); and the Vrba–Wetzler report (which is contains the testimony of two prisoners escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau, published alongside the testimony of the Jerzy Tabeau, the Polish Major in Auschwitz Protocols) speak only to limited areas within the system of extermination, do not present a full picture of the killing, and were scarcely made available to the larger public due to an editorial policy that questioned the statistics at the time. [8] The Black Book of Soviet Jewry did not circulate during the war, while the Vrba–Wetzler report (April 1944) saw a limited and circumscribed distribution (though it convinced the regent of Hungary to halt transports in June of 1944, which had until then been proceeding at a rate of 12,000 deportees per day). The Black Book of Polish Jewry and even earlier reports in the Allied press presented details, but these documents significantly understate the scale of the killings – due in part to limited information, and in part to a (retrospectively) misplaced sense of discretion and sensitivity to the prevailing attitude of antisemitism amongst all Western powers, whether Allied or Axis: there was a desire to make the reports speak to an audience unconcerned about the fate of Jews. [9]
Articles such as the report on atrocities in the May 7th, 1945 issue of Life Magazine (7 May 1945, 31–37) began the process of substantively documenting and revealing aspects of what had happened to the global public whereas before knowledge of the mass-killings and the gas-chambers – though alluded to, for example, in speeches by Churchill (24 August 1941 broadcast, re: 'Appeal to Roosevelt') – and reported by rumor or anecdote, remained hazy and fragmentary in public consciousness. Many of the earliest accounts came from individual camps and the documents listed above – most substantially the Nuremberg Trial documents –but these remained obscure apart from high-level (or generally vague) quotation in journalism. [9]
Early major attempts at systematic scholarship or overviews of the whole system and process of Nazi genocide include:
The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe, primarily Occupied Poland, during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.
Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution", the overall Nazi effort to complete the genocide of all European Jews. Before Germany's defeat put an end to this project more than six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust. The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 500 m (1,600 ft) south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.
The Romani Holocaust was the planned effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies and collaborators to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against European Roma and Sinti peoples during the Holocaust era.
Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate which is approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide. In the time frame of July to October 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just Operation Reinhard, amounted to two million killed in those four months alone. It was the single fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.
Chełmno or Kulmhof was the first of Nazi Germany's extermination camps and was situated 50 km (31 mi) north of Łódź, near the village of Chełmno nad Nerem. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Germany annexed the area into the new territory of Reichsgau Wartheland. The camp, which was specifically intended for no other purpose than mass murder, operated from December 8, 1941, to April 11, 1943, parallel to Operation Reinhard during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust, and again from June 23, 1944, to January 18, 1945, during the Soviet counter-offensive. In 1943, modifications were made to the camp's killing methods as the reception building had already been dismantled.
The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the most-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists the names of all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million Jews were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
Names of the Holocaust vary based on context. "The Holocaust" is the name commonly applied in English since the mid-1940s to the systematic extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The Höfle Telegram is a cryptic one-page document, discovered in 2000 among the declassified World War II archives of the Public Record Office in Kew, England. The document consists of several radio telegrams in translation, among them a top-secret message sent by SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on 11 January 1943; one, to SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, and one to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim in German-occupied Kraków (Cracow).
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
Jewish resistance under Nazi rule took various forms of organized underground activities conducted against German occupation regimes in Europe by Jews during World War II. According to historian Yehuda Bauer, Jewish resistance was defined as actions that were taken against all laws and actions acted by Germans. The term is particularly connected with the Holocaust and includes a multitude of different social responses by those oppressed, as well as both passive and armed resistance conducted by Jews themselves.
The Holocaust in Poland was the ghettoization, robbery, deportation, and murder of Jews, simultaneously with other people groups for identical racial pretexts, in occupied Poland, organized by Nazi Germany. Three million Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau extermination camps, representing half of all Jews murdered during the Europe-wide Holocaust.
The issue of why the Allies did not act on early reports of atrocities in the Auschwitz concentration camp by destroying it or its railways by air during World War II has been a subject of controversy since the late 1970s. Brought to public attention by a 1978 article from historian David Wyman, it has been described by Michael Berenbaum as "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust", and whether or not the Allies had the requisite knowledge and the technical capability to act continues to be explored by historians. The U.S. government followed the military's strong advice to always keep the defeat of Germany the paramount objective, and refused to tolerate outside civilian advice regarding alternative military operations. No major American Jewish organizations recommended bombing.
Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and other European railways under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps.
Janowska concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 1941 on the outskirts of Lwów in what had become, after the German invasion, the General Government. The camp was named after the nearby street Janowska in Lwów of the interwar Second Polish Republic.
Sonderbehandlung is any sort of preferential treatment. However, the word Sonderbehandlung was used as a euphemism for mass murder by Nazi functionaries and the SS, who commonly used the abbreviation S.B. in documentation. It first came to prominence during Aktion T4, where SS doctors killed mentally ill and disabled patients between 1939 and 1941, and was one of a number of nonspecific words the Nazis used to document mass murder and genocide. Another notable example was Sonderbehandlung 14f13.
The Holocaust in the Netherlands was organized by Nazi Germany in occupied Netherlands as part of the Holocaust across Europe during the Second World War. The Nazi occupation in 1940 immediately began disrupting the norms of Dutch society, separating Dutch Jews in multiple ways from the general Dutch population. The Nazis used existing Dutch civil administration as well as the Dutch Jewish Council "as an invaluable means to their end". In 1939, there were some 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 24,000 to 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany in the 1930s. Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust. The 1947 census reported 14,346 Jews, or 10% of the pre-war population. This further decrease is attributed to massive emigration of Jews to the then British Mandate of Palestine. There is debate among scholars about the extent to which the Dutch public was aware of the Holocaust. Postwar Netherlands has grappled with construction the historical memory of the Holocaust and created monuments memorializing this chapter Dutch history. The Dutch National Holocaust Museum opened in March 2024.
The Black Book of Polish Jewry is a 400-page report about the progress of the Holocaust in Poland published in 1943 during World War II by the American Federation for Polish Jews in cooperation with the Association of Jewish Refugees and Immigrants from Poland. It was compiled by Jacob Apenszlak with Jacob Kenner, Isaac Lewin and Moses Polakiewicz, and released by Roy Publishers of New York with an introduction by Ignacy Schwarzbart from the National Council of the Polish Republic. The book was sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, US Senator Robert Wagner, and other high-ranking community leaders. Historian Michael Fleming suggests it downplayed the true scale and manner of the Holocaust in an effort to elicit the empathy of its readership.
The question of how much Germans knew about the Holocaust whilst it was being executed is a matter of debate by historians. With regard to Nazi Germany, some historians argue that it was an open secret amongst the population. Peter Longerich argues that the Holocaust was an open secret by early 1943, but some authors place it even earlier. However, after the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a claim associated with the stereotypical phrase "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst".
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