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Brihah was a postwar, clandestine movement that helped Jews emigrate from eastern Europe into the Allied-occupied zones and Palestine or Israel. Learn more.
Adolf Hitler came to power with the goal of establishing a new racial order in Europe dominated by the German “master race.” This goal drove Nazi foreign policy. Learn more
Jews have lived across Europe for centuries. Learn more about European Jewish life and culture before the Holocaust.
Between 1939-1942, Nazi Germany invaded multiple countries across Europe. Learn more about German expansion during World War II.
During WWII, a few thousand Polish Jewish refugees lived in Japan. Learn more about the wartime relocation into and the conditions of the Shanghai ghetto.
Based on their ideas about race, the Nazis mass murdered people with disabilities; people perceived as threats in occupied Poland; and Jewish people. Learn more.
Ghettos separating Jews from the rest of the population were part of the Nazi plan to destroy Europe's Jews. Learn about three types of ghettos: closed, open, and destruction.
Sholem Asch was a Yiddish dramatist and novelist. He depicted small town Jewish life and socialist themes. His work was burned in Nazi Germany in 1933.
View of part of the Plaszow concentration camp in occupied Poland, showing an entrance gate. Plaszow, Poland, 1943-1944.
The Nazis frequently used propaganda to disguise their political aims and deceive the German and international public. Learn more.
The Nazis used poisonous gas to murder millions of people in gas vans or stationary gas chambers. The vast majority of those killed by gassing were Jews.
Nazi authorities established the Lodz ghetto in 1940. Learn about living conditions and forced labor in the ghetto, as well as deportations to and from there.
The SS was the elite guard of the Nazi regime and became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany. Learn about its role in carrying out Nazi policies.
The Krakow ghetto in German-occupied Poland held over 15,000 Jews. Learn more about Krakow and the ghetto’s history during the Holocaust and WWII.
Following World War I, the Treaty of Versailles (1918) declared Danzig to be a free city administered by Poland and the League of Nations. Germany resented the loss of this largely German city. After invading Poland in September 1939, Nazi Germany annexed Danzig.
Young people's diaries capture some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Irena Aronowicz.
Explore a timeline of key events during 1946-1948. Learn about the aftermath of the Holocaust and the obstacles survivors faced.
Survivor Elie Wiesel devoted his life to educating the world about the Holocaust. Learn about key events in the world and his life from 1928–1951.
The "Final Solution," the Nazi plan to kill the Jews of Europe, was a core goal of Adolf Hitler and the culmination of German policy under Nazi rule.
Read a detailed timeline of the Holocaust and World War II. Learn about key dates and events from 1933-45 as Nazi antisemitic policies became more radical.
Blood libels were false allegations that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children in rituals. Nazi propagandists used this false charge in their antisemitic propaganda.
Facing overwhelming odds, Jews throughout occupied Europe attempted armed resistance against the Germans and their Axis partners.
Emanuel Ringelblum was a Warsaw-based historian and social welfare worker before WWII. Learn about the secret archive he would establish in the Warsaw ghetto.
Janusz Korczak ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. He and his staff stayed with the children even as German authorities deported them to their deaths at Treblinka in 1942.
The term “pogrom” historically refers to violent attacks on Jews by local non-Jewish populations. Learn about pogroms before, during, and after the Holocaust.
The term Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a euphemism used by Nazi Germany’s leaders. It referred to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.
The city of Warsaw is the capital of Poland. Before World War II, Warsaw was the center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Warsaw's prewar Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30 percent of the city's total population. The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, behind that of New York City. The Germans occupied Warsaw on September 29, 1939. In October 1940, the Germans ordered the establishment of a ghetto in…
Heinrich Himmler was the leader of the dreaded SS of the Nazi Party from 1929 until 1945. Learn more about key dates in the life of Heinrich Himmler.
Before the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Europe had a vibrant, established, and diverse Jewish culture. By 1945, two out of every three European Jews had been killed.
Leon Jakubowicz began constructing a model of the Lodz ghetto in the spring of 1940, after the ghetto was sealed. Explore the artifact and Leon's story.
Explore the story of over 2,000 Polish Jewish refugees who fled east to escape war-torn Europe. They sought safety in such distant places as China and Japan.
Germany started World War II in Europe on September 1, 1939, by invading Poland. War would continue until 1945. Learn more about key events in the history of WWII.
Following World War I, the Treaty of Versailles (1918) declared Danzig to be a free city administered by Poland and the League of Nations. Germany resented the loss of this largely German city. After invading Poland in September 1939, Nazi Germany annexed Danzig.
Guta Blass Weintraub was born to Jewish parents in Lodz, Poland. Not long after Guta entered secondary school, the Germans invaded Poland. Guta was forced to work in labor camps until 1944, when she was deported to the Majowka camp. From there, sh...
Aron in Budapest, 1945, while en route from Poland to Italy with Brihah, moving to Palestine. In Aron's words: "We got connected with the Brihah in Poland, got directions to go to Bratislava and on to Budapest. On our trip, we didn't know where we going from city to city, only our final destination." July 5, 1945, Budapest, Hungary.
Diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Read excerpts from the diary of an anonymous child in the Lodz ghetto.
Children's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Miriam Goldberg.
The Germans established the Breendonk internment camp in a fortress near Antwerp, Belgium. Hundreds of people died there by torture, executions, and harsh conditions.
Learn more about the Soviet occupation of Europe before and after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II.
Ludwig Meidner was an Expressionist artist and poet. He was on the list of banned writers and artists in Nazi Germany. Monographs about him were burned in 1933.
Prewar portrait of Pinchas and Roza Zygielbojm taken in 1936 in Warsaw, Poland. In 1942, they were taken into the Ponary forest outside of Vilna and killed by the SS and Lithuanian collaborators. Born in 1906, Pinchas Zygielbojm was an actor and brother of Szmul Artur Zygielbojm, a leader of the Jewish socialist Bund in interwar Poland and later a member of the National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London.
Nazi Germany occupied Lvov, Poland in 1941. Learn about Lvov during World War II, the establishment of the Lvov ghetto, and deportations of Jews from there.
Marian was raised by Catholic parents in Niewodowo, a town in Poland's Bialystok Province near Lomza. His family lived there under Tsarist rule until 1918, when Poland regained its independence. Following high school, Marian joined the Capuchin Franciscan Order of Friars. After eight years of study in France and Italy, he returned to Poland to teach philosophy to students of his order. 1933-39: When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Marian was at his monastery near Grodno. They evacuated the…
Explore Estelle Laughlin’s biography and learn about her experiences during the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Antisemitism: hostility toward or hatred of Jews as a religious or ethnic group, often accompanied by social, economic, or political discrimination. Appellplatz: German word for roll call square where prisoners were forced to assemble. Aryan: Term used in Nazi Germany to refer to non-Jewish and non-Roma (Gypsy) Caucasians. Northern Europeans with especially "Nordic" features such as blonde hair and blue eyes were considered by so-called race scientists to be the most superior of Aryans, members of a…
Nazi Germany and its allies established over 44,000 concentration camps and incarceration sites during the Holocaust. Read about the Nazi camp system.
Forced labor, often pointless, humiliating, without proper equipment, clothing, nourishment, or rest, was a core feature in the Nazi camp system from its beginnings in 1933.
The Nazi Euthanasia Program, codenamed Aktion "T4," was the systematic murder of institutionalized people with disabilities. Read about Nazi “euthanasia.”
Photograph of a group of Jewish partisans. Sumsk, Poland, date uncertain.
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