| Part of a series on |
| Jews and Judaism |
|---|
| Part of a series on the |
| Culture of Liechtenstein |
|---|
 |
| History |
| People |
| Languages |
| Mythology |
| Cuisine |
| Festivals |
| Religion |
| Music |
| Sport |
The history of the Jews in Liechtenstein goes back nearly a century, in particular to the time of the Holocaust.
The Jewish community of Liechtenstein in 2022 is a population of 30 people who attend a synagogue in Switzerland. [1]
From 2001 to 2005, an international team of six historians (including Dan Michman and Peter Geiger) investigated the matter for the World Jewish Congress. [2] Their conclusions are following.
In its report, the commission concludes that the tiny state did not employ slave workers and no assets belonging to Jewish families were confiscated but the country's refugee policy was ambivalent. [3]
About 400 Jewish refugees fled to Liechtenstein during the Nazi era to find safety in the neutral Alpine principality during World War II, 235 were accepted but 165 were turned back. [2] In addition, the principality allowed 144 Jews to become citizens "in return for high fees" during the Nazi era. Most of those new citizens (German : Neubürger) never lived in Liechtenstein but chose another country. The fact of being a Liechtensteiner made it easier for them to establish themselves in a Western country.
Even though it was sandwiched between neutral Switzerland and Nazi-controlled Austria, Liechtenstein still had some room to maneuver. Liechtenstein accepted mainly rich Jews, who were expected to spend their money in the country or who created jobs by establishing companies in the principality. Like most other Western and overseas countries, Liechtenstein tightened its immigration laws in 1938. Liechtenstein's policy can therefore be compared to that of other countries.
The family of Liechtenstein's Prince Franz Josef II bought 3 estates taken from Jews in Austria and Czechoslovakia, where rented Jewish inmates from a Nazi SS concentration camp near Vienna worked. No works of art plundered by the Nazis were traced to Liechtenstein collections. [2]
Political identity came to the territory now occupied by the Principality of Liechtenstein in 814, with the formation of the subcountry of Lower Rhætia. Liechtenstein's borders have remained unchanged since 1434, when the Rhine established the border between the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss cantons.
The World Jewish Congress (WJC) is an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations, founded in Geneva, Switzerland in August 1936. According to its mission statement, the World Jewish Congress's main purpose is to act as "the diplomatic arm of the Jewish people". Membership in the WJC is open to all representative Jewish groups or communities, irrespective of the social, political or economic ideology of the community's host country. The World Jewish Congress headquarters are in New York City, and the organization maintains international offices in Brussels, Belgium; Jerusalem; Paris, France; Moscow, Russia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Geneva, Switzerland. The WJC has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
During World War I and World War II, Switzerland maintained armed neutrality, and was not invaded by its neighbors, in part because of its topography, much of which is mountainous. Germany was a threat, and Switzerland built a powerful defense. It served as a "protecting power" for the belligerents of both sides, with a special role in helping prisoners of war. The belligerent states made it the scene for diplomacy, espionage, and commerce, as well as being a safe haven for 300,000 refugees.
Andrew Lawrence Somers was an American businessman, World War I veteran, and Democratic politician who served 13 terms as a U.S. Representative from New York from 1925 until his death in 1949.
Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A "displaced persons camp" is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Czechoslovaks, Estonians, Greeks, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Kalmyks, and Belarusians.
The Bergier commission in Bern was formed by the Swiss government on 12 December 1996 in the wake of the then ongoing World Jewish Congress lawsuit against Swiss banks accused of withholding valuables belonging to Holocaust victims. It is also known as the ICE or UEK.
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.
The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa. The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 is a 1984 nonfiction book by David S. Wyman, former Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wyman was the chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. The Abandonment of the Jews has been well received by most historians, and has won numerous prizes and widespread recognition, including a National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Present Tense Literary Award, the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award."
Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accepted definition of the term, and it has been applied variously to Jews who survived the war in German-occupied Europe or other Axis territories, as well as to those who fled to Allied and neutral countries before or during the war. In some cases, non-Jews who also experienced collective persecution under the Nazi regime are considered Holocaust survivors as well. The definition has evolved over time.
The World Jewish Congress lawsuit against Swiss banks was launched in 1995 to retrieve deposits made into the three largest Swiss banks by victims of Nazi persecution during and prior to World War II. WJC negotiations were initiated with the Government of Switzerland and Swiss banks, and later expanded to cover Swiss insurance companies, over burdensome proof-of-ownership requirements for accounts and insurance policies. Strong support from both federal and state United States politicians and officials, threats of sanctions against the three Swiss banks, as well as leaked documents from a bank guard pressured a settlement of the suit in 1998 in a U.S. court for multiple classes of people affected by government and banking practices. The Swiss government itself was not a signatory to the deal. As of early 2020, US$1.29 billion has been disbursed to approximately 458,400 claimants.
Foreign relations of the Axis powers includes states which were not officially members of the Axis but had relations with one or more Axis members.
Responsibility for the Holocaust is the subject of an ongoing historical debate that has spanned several decades. The debate about the origins of the Holocaust is known as functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Adolf Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people as early as 1918 and personally oversaw its execution. However, functionalists such as Raul Hilberg argue that the extermination plans evolved in stages, as a result of initiatives that were taken by bureaucrats in response to other policy failures. To a large degree, the debate has been settled by acknowledgement of both centralized planning and decentralized attitudes and choices.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and enacted policies that would culminate in the Holocaust, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe and the United Kingdom was one of the destinations. Some came on transit visas, which meant that they stayed in Britain temporarily, while waiting to be accepted by another country. Others entered the country by having obtained employment or a guarantor, or via Kindertransport. There were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who were accepted into Britain by the start of World War II on 1 September 1939, and an additional 10,000 people who made it to Britain during the war.
Between 1933 and 1945, a large number of Jews emigrated from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. This exodus was triggered by the militaristic antisemitism perpetrated by the Nazi Party and by Germany's collaborators, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. However, even before the genocide itself, which began during World War II, the Nazis had widely sponsored or enforced discriminatory practices—by legislation, in many cases—against Jewish residents, such as through the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. Although Adolf Hitler and the German government were initially accepting of voluntary Jewish emigration from the country, it became difficult to find new host countries, particularly as the 1930s were marked by the Great Depression, as the number of Jewish migrants increased. Eventually, the Nazis forbade emigration; the Jews who remained in Germany or in German-occupied territory by this point were either murdered in the ghettos or relocated to be systematically exploited and murdered at dedicated concentration camps and extermination camps throughout the European continent.
Prior to joining the Allied Powers late in the war, Turkey was officially neutral in World War II. Despite its neutrality, Turkey maintained strong diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany during the period of the Holocaust. During the war, Turkey denaturalized 3,000 to 5,000 Jews living abroad; between 2,200 and 2,500 Turkish Jews were deported to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor; and several hundred confined in Nazi concentration camps. When Nazi Germany encouraged neutral countries to repatriate their Jewish diaspora, Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid repatriating Jews even if they could prove their Turkish nationality. Turkey was also the only neutral country to implement anti-Jewish laws during the war. Between 1940 and 1944, around 13,000 Jews passed through Turkey from Europe to Mandatory Palestine. According to the research of historian Rıfat Bali, more Turkish Jews suffered as a result of discriminatory policies during the war than were saved by Turkey. Since the war, Turkey and parts of the Turkish Jewish community have promoted exaggerated claims of rescuing Jews, using this myth to promote Armenian genocide denial.
A neutral state, the United States entered the war on the Allied side in December 1941. The American government first became aware of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe in 1942 and 1943. Following a report on the failure to assist the Jewish people by the Department of State, the War Refugee Board was created in 1944 to assist refugees from the Nazis. As one of the most powerful Allied states, the United States played a major role in the military defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent Nuremberg trials. The Holocaust saw increased awareness in the 1970s that instilled its prominence in the collective memory of the American people continuing to the present day. The United States has been criticized for taking insufficient action in response to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s and the Holocaust during World War II.
Portugal was officially neutral during World War II and the period of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe. The country had been ruled by an authoritarian political regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar but had not been significantly influenced by racial antisemitism and was considered more sympathetic to the Allies than was neighbouring Francoist Spain.
Sweden was a neutral state during World War II and was not directly involved in the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe. Nonetheless, the Swedish government maintained important economic links with Nazi Germany and there was widespread awareness within the country of its policy of persecution and, from 1942, mass extermination of Jews.
 | This Liechtenstein-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
 | This article related to Jewish history is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |