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.
Rezső Kasztner, also known as Rudolf Israel Kastner, was a Hungarian-Israeli journalist and lawyer who became known for having helped a group of Jews escape from occupied Europe during the Holocaust on the Kastner train. After World War II, he was accused of having failed to inform the majority of Hungarian Jews about the reality of what awaited them in Auschwitz. He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israeli court accused him of having "sold his soul to the devil," a charge that was overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel in 1958.
Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture, and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp, the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Ari Libsker, is an Israeli filmmaker and journalist. He has made several documentaries. His film Stalags (2008) featured in The New York Times and won several awards. In March 2012 he curated the exhibition "Iran", which protests what he views as "panic over the Iranian atomic bomb."
A kapo was one of prisoner functionaries, a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Joel Brand was a member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, an underground Zionist group in Budapest, Hungary, that smuggled Jews out of German-occupied Europe to the relative safety of Hungary, during the Holocaust. When Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, Brand became known for his efforts to save the Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland and the gas chambers there.
SzymonSrebrnik was a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor of the Chełmno extermination camp – a German Nazi death camp established in occupied Poland during World War II. Srebrnik escaped after being shot in the back of his head at close range, two days before the Russians arrived in 1945. His testimony along with that of the few other witnesses was critical to the prosecution of camp personnel and other Nazi officials, because of the destruction of evidence by the Germans of their mass extermination of Jews in Chełmno.
Stalag fiction was a short-lived genre of erotic literature which flourished in Israel during the 1950s and 60s. The genre consisted of pornographic Nazi exploitation books, depicting female Nazi officers in prisoner-of-war camps (stalags) sexually abusing male Allied prisoners. Many of these books purported to be real accounts from actual Allied prisoners-of-war, and avoided featuring Jewish characters in an effort to prevent them from becoming controversial. The genre came to an end during the Eichmann trial due to being banned by the Israeli government. They are mostly no longer available in traditional publication format, but with the advent of the Internet works in the genre have been circulated via peer-to-peer file sharing.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Moshe Bejski was a Polish-born Israeli Supreme Court Justice and President of Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations Commission. After surviving the Holocaust with the help of Oskar Schindler, Bejski immigrated to Israel. In 1961, he testified about his experiences during the Holocaust during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He served on the Tel Aviv-Yafo district court from 1968 to 1979 and was appointed to the Supreme Court of Israel, where he served from 1979 to 1991. As President of the Righteous Commission from 1975 to 1991, Bejski helped honor thousands of Holocaust rescuers. He also headed the Bejski Commission in the aftermath of the 1983 Israel bank stock crisis, which led to the nationalization of most of Israel's major banks.
The Eichmann trial was the 1961 trial in Israel of major Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann who was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and brought to Israel to stand trial. Eichmann was a senior Nazi party member and served at the rank of Obersturmbenführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS, and was one of the people primarily responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution. He was responsible for the Nazis' train shipments from across Europe to the concentration camps, even managing the shipment to Hungary directly, where 564,000 Jews died. After World War II he fled to Argentina, living under the pseudonym "Ricardo Clement" until his capture in 1960 by Mossad.
Yehiel De-Nur, also known by his pen name Ka-Tsetnik 135633, born Yehiel Feiner, was a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, whose books were inspired by his time as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Barricades was one of the first documentary films created for Israeli television. It tells the story of two families, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, who both lost children during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, known to Palestinians as the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, the Naqba, or "Catastrophe." The film, directed by Ram Loevy, caused considerable controversy when it aired on 1 August 1972. It was the first time that an Arab viewer had a chance through an Israeli film to experience the emotional significance of the Holocaust for Jews, and it was also the first time that Israeli Jews had an opportunity to experience the emotional significance of the Naqba to the Palestinian people.
The Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v. Malchiel Gruenwald, commonly known as the Kastner trial, was a libel case in Jerusalem, Israel. Hearings were held from 1 January to October 1954 in the District Court of Jerusalem before Judge Benjamin Halevi (1910–1996), who published his decision on 22 June 1955.
Benjamin Israel Murmelstein was an Austrian rabbi. He was one of 17 community rabbis in Vienna in 1938 and the only one remaining in Vienna by late 1939. An important figure and board member of the Jewish group in Vienna during the early stages of the war, he was also an "Ältester" of the Judenrat in the Theresienstadt concentration camp after 1943. He was the only "Judenältester" to survive the Holocaust and has been credited with saving the lives of thousands of Jews by assisting in their emigration, while also being accused of being a Nazi collaborator.
Kalman Taigman also Teigman Hebrew: קלמן טייגמן was an Israeli citizen who was born and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. One of the former members of the Jewish Sonderkommando who escaped from the Treblinka extermination camp during the prisoner uprising of August 1943, Taigman later testified at the 1961 Eichmann Trial held in Jerusalem.
The People vs. Fritz Bauer is a 2015 German biographical drama film directed by Lars Kraume, chronicling the German Jewish prosecutor Fritz Bauer's post-war capture of former Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
The Eichmann Show is a 2015 British BBC TV drama film produced by Laurence Bowen and Ken Marshall and directed by Paul Andrew Williams.
"Like sheep to the slaughter" is a phrase that refers to the idea that Jews went passively to their deaths during the Holocaust. It derives from a similar phrase in the Hebrew Bible that favorably depicts martyrdom in both the Jewish and Christian religious traditions. Opposition to the phrase became associated with Jewish nationalism due to its use in Josippon and by Jewish self-defense groups after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. During the Holocaust, Abba Kovner and other Jewish resistance leaders used the phrase to exhort Jews to fight back. In postwar Israel, some demonized Holocaust survivors as having gone "like sheep to the slaughter" while armed resistance was glorified. The phrase was taken to mean that Jews had not tried to save their own lives, and consequently were partly responsible for their own suffering and death. This myth, which has become less prominent over time, is frequently criticized by historians, theologians, and survivors as a form of victim blaming.
The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law is a 1950 Israeli law passed by the First Knesset that provides a legal framework for the prosecution of crimes against Jews and other persecuted people committed in Nazi Germany, German-occupied Europe, or territory under the control of another Axis power between 1933 and 1945. The law's primary target was Jewish Holocaust survivors alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis, in particular prisoner functionaries ("kapos") and the Jewish Ghetto Police. It was motivated by the anger of survivors against perceived collaborators and a desire to "purify" the community.