How Did War Affect The Jews?

• Persecution of the Jews developed in intensity after the outbreak of war in 1939
• After defeating Poland in 1939, Nazis set about ‘Germanising’ Western Poland

  • this meant transporting Poles from their homes and replacing them with German settlers
  • 1 in 5 Poles died in the fighting and as a result of racial policies of 1939-45
  • Polish Jews rounded up and transported to the major cities - headed into sealed areas called ghettos
  • able-bodied Jews used for slave labour but the young, old and sick left to die from hunger and disease
• 1941 - Germany invaded the USSR

  • great success at first but within weeks, the Nazis found themselves in control of 3 million Russian Jews
  • Germans forces rounded up and shot Communist Partty activists and their Jewish supporters
  • shooting was carried out by special SS units called Einsatzgrappen
  • By the autumn of 1941, mass shootings were taking place all over occupied Eastern Europe
  • All Jews were ordered to wear the star of David to mark them out
• January 1942 - senior Nazis met at Wannsee, suburb of Berlin, for a conference to discuss the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ (1)

  • Himmler (head of the SS and Gestapo) was put in charge of the systematic killing of all Jews within Germany and German-occupied territory
  • slave labour and death camps were built t Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmo and other places
  • old, sick and young were killed immediately
• January 1942 - senior Nazis met at Wannsee, suburb of Berlin, for a conference to discuss the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ (2)

  • able-bodied were first used as slave labour
  • some were used for appalling medical experiments
  • 6 million Jews, 500,000 european romas and countless political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and Russian and Polish prisoners of war were sent to these camps to be worked to death, gassed or shot
• Many Jews escaped from Germany before the killing started and some managed to live undercover in Germany and the occupied territories (1)

  • Gad Beck led the Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Berlin - was captured in April 1945
  • he was due to be executed but was rescued by a detachment of troops from the Jewish regiment of the Red Army who had heard of his capture
  • 28 known groups of Jewish fighters and may have been many more
• Many Jews escaped from Germany before the killing started and some managed to live undercover in Germany and the occupied territories (2)

  • many Jews fought in the resistance movement in the Nazi-occupied lands
  • 1945 - Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose up and held out against the Nazis for 4 weeks
  • 5 concentration camps saw armed uprisings and Greek Jews managed to blow up the gas ovens at Auschwitz
• Many Germans and other non-jews helped Jews by hiding them and smuggling them out of German-held territory

  • Industrialist, Oskar Schindler, protected and saved many by getting them on his list of workers
  • Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, worked with other reissters to provide Jews with Swedish and US passports to get them out of the reach of the Nazis in Hungary
  • he disappeared in 1945
  • High-profile individuals were rare as msot successful resistors were successful because they had an extremely low profile