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Franz Monjau
ID CardAfter secondary school, Franz studied painting at Duesseldorf's Academy of Fine Arts, eventually shifting to art education. He joined an avant-garde group rebelling against traditional painting. Later, he taught art to high school students. For Franz the drift towards fascism was frightening, as was the increasing antisemitism. But being only half Jewish, he did not feel worried about his personal safety. 1933-39: Hitler became chancellor of Germany on Franz's thirtieth birthday. Five months later Franz…
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Jacob Polak
ID CardJacob, known as "Jaap," and his three sisters grew up in Amsterdam in a religious, Zionist Jewish family that could trace its roots in the Netherlands back 200 years. Jaap attended a Jewish elementary school until the age of 12, and then enrolled in a commercial high school, where he studied accounting. After graduating, he took a position in the Amsterdam Carlton Hotel. He worked there in 1931 and 1932. 1933-39: Jaap's life had been centered mostly in the Jewish community, so the Carlton Hotel was a new,…
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Josef Schoen
ID CardJosef was born to German Catholic parents. They lived in a Moravian village near the city of Sternberk in a German-inhabited region known as the Sudetenland. At that time Czechoslovakia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Upon graduation from a textile school, Josef supervised 600 employees at a silk factory in Moravska Trebova. 1933-39: After serving in the Czechoslovak army, Josef became a Jehovah's Witness in Prague, and refused to have anything more to do with the military, following the…
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Thomas Pfeffer
ID CardThomas' father, Heinz, was a German-Jewish refugee who had married Henriette De Leeuw, a Dutch-Jewish woman. Frightened by the Nazi dictatorship and the murder of Heinz's uncle in a concentration camp, they immigrated to the Netherlands when Henriette was nine months pregnant with Thomas' older brother. They settled in Amsterdam. 1933-39: Thomas, also known as Tommy, was born 18 months after his older brother, Jan-Peter. In 1939 the parents and brother of Tommy's father joined them in the Netherlands as…
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Nesse Galperin
ID CardNesse was born to an observant Jewish family in Siauliai, known in Yiddish as Shavl. Her parents owned a store that sold dairy products. The city was home to a vibrant Jewish community of almost 10,000 people. It had over a dozen synagogues and was renowned for its impressive cultural and social organizations. 1933–39: Nesse's family was very religious and observed all the Jewish laws. She attended Hebrew school and was raised in a loving household, where the values of community and caring always were…
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Jan Komski
ID CardJan was born to a Catholic family in the small Polish town of Bircza. His father, a World War I veteran, moved the family to Brzozow shortly after the war. Brzozow was a small manufacturing town in southeastern Poland. After graduating from secondary school, Jan enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. 1933-39: Cracow was a beautiful old city; Jan studied its remarkable churches and synagogues in his classes. By September 1939, however, the war engulfed the beauty of Cracow. He left to escape the…
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Gyula (Gyuszi) Brieger
ID CardGyula was also known as Gyuszi. He was born into a large religious Jewish family in the village of Nagyhalasz in northeastern Hungary. The Briegers spoke both Yiddish and Hungarian. After Gyula's mother died, his father remarried and the family moved to the town of Nyiregyhaza, where his father owned and operated a hardware store. Nyiregyhaza had a Jewish population of 5,000. 1933-39: Gyula was the second oldest son in a household of seven children. Nyiregyhaza was a rural town in which people still used…
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Dorotka (Dora) Goldstein Roth describes retaliation against women for an escape from Stutthof
Oral HistoryAfter the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Dora's family fled to Vilna, Lithuania. When the Germans occupied Vilna, Dora's father was shot and the rest of the family was confined in the Vilna ghetto. Dora, her sister, and her mother were deported to the Kaiserwald camp in Latvia and then to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. Her mother and sister perished in Stutthof. Dora herself was shot immediately before liberation, but she survived.
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Abraham Klausner describes postwar efforts to reunite survivors
Oral HistoryRabbi Abraham Klausner was a US Army military chaplain. He arrived in the Dachau concentration camp in May 1945. He was attached to the 116th evacuation hospital unit and worked for about five years in displaced persons camps, assisting Jewish survivors.
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Deportations of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews
Timeline EventOctober 15, 1941. On this date, German authorities began the deportation of Jews from central Europe to ghettos in occupied eastern territory..
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Lilly Appelbaum Malnik
ID CardLilly Appelbaum was born in Antwerp, Belgium to Jewish parents, Israel and Justine. Lilly's parents separated before she was born. Her father immigrated to the United States. Lilly had two older siblings, Leon (born 1927) and Maria (born 1925). She lived with her maternal grandparents in Antwerp. During the week, her mother lived in Brussels, where she operated a small workshop that made raincoats. 1933-39: Lilly and her grandparents lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Antwerp. She went to a…
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Ruth Webber describes escaping from a selection held in the Auschwitz infirmary
Oral HistoryRuth was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland and occupied Ostrowiec. Her family was forced into a ghetto. Germans took over her father's photography business, although he was allowed to continue working outside the ghetto. Before the ghetto was liquidated, Ruth's parents sent her sister into hiding, and managed to get work at a labor camp outside the ghetto. Ruth also went into hiding, either in nearby woods or within the camp itself. When the camp was liquidated, Ruth's parents were split up.…
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Ruth Webber describes the bitterness that she felt after the end of the war when she was in an orphanage in Krakow
Oral HistoryRuth was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland and occupied Ostrowiec. Her family was forced into a ghetto. Germans took over her father's photography business, although he was allowed to continue working outside the ghetto. Before the ghetto was liquidated, Ruth's parents sent her sister into hiding, and managed to get work at a labor camp outside the ghetto. Ruth also went into hiding, either in nearby woods or within the camp itself. When the camp was liquidated, Ruth's parents were split up.…
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Ruth Webber describes the bitterness that she felt after the end of the war when she was in an orphanage in Krakow
Oral HistoryRuth was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland and occupied Ostrowiec. Her family was forced into a ghetto. Germans took over her father's photography business, although he was allowed to continue working outside the ghetto. Before the ghetto was liquidated, Ruth's parents sent her sister into hiding, and managed to get work at a labor camp outside the ghetto. Ruth also went into hiding, either in nearby woods or within the camp itself. When the camp was liquidated, Ruth's parents were split up.…
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Ruth Webber describes the Auschwitz crematoria
Oral HistoryRuth was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland and occupied Ostrowiec. Her family was forced into a ghetto. Germans took over her father's photography business, although he was allowed to continue working outside the ghetto. Before the ghetto was liquidated, Ruth's parents sent her sister into hiding, and managed to get work at a labor camp outside the ghetto. Ruth also went into hiding, either in nearby woods or within the camp itself. When the camp was liquidated, Ruth's parents were split up.…
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Reinhard Heydrich: In Depth
ArticleReinhard Heydrich, Reich Security Main Office chief, was one of the main architects of the “Final Solution," the Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Europe.
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Mirjana Babunovic Dimitrijevic
ID CardMirjana was the second of three children born to well-to-do Serbian parents in the capital of Bosnia, in central Yugoslavia. Her father was a successful businessman and prominent Serbian nationalist. Like her parents, Mirjana was baptized in the Serbian Orthodox faith. Mirjana attended elementary school in the multi-ethnic city of Sarajevo. 1933-39: While in secondary school, Mirjana studied foreign languages and toured western Europe. In 1938 she graduated. That fall she enrolled as a student of English…
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Mara Jovicic Popovic
ID CardMara was one of six children born to Serbian parents. The family lived in the small town of Foca in the region of Bosnia. Like her parents, Mara was baptized in the Serbian Orthodox faith. She grew up in Foca and in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, where she completed secondary school. In 1930 she married Rajko Popovic, a circuit court judge. The couple had no children. 1933-39: In 1934 Rajko completed a judicial tour of duty in Foca, and the couple moved to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Mara and Rajko…
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Wladyslaw Piotrowski
ID CardWladyslaw was born to Catholic parents in Russian-occupied Poland. He grew up in Plock, a town located in a rural area north of Warsaw. Wladyslaw married in 1918 and he and his wife, Marie, raised four children. 1933-39: Wladyslaw worked as a bookkeeper, and then as an accountant for a local farmers' cooperative. In 1931 he was sent to the town of Wyszogrod to close a failing branch of the farmers cooperative. A year later, he organized a new, successful cooperative in Wyszogrod with local farmers and…
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Henny Schermann
ID CardHenny's parents met in Germany soon after her father emigrated from the Russian Empire. Henny was the first of the Jewish couple's three children. The family lived in Frankfurt am Main, an important center of commerce, banking, industry and the arts. 1933-39: After the Nazis came to power, they began to persecute Jews, Roma (Gypsies), men accused of homosexuality, people with disabilities, and political opponents. In 1938, as one way of identifying Jews, a Nazi ordinance decreed that "Sara" was to be…
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Bernhard Liebster
ID CardBernhard, who was from a religious Jewish family in the Polish town of Oswiecim, emigrated as a young man to Frankfurt, Germany. There he married Bertha Oppenheimer from the nearby town of Reichenbach. They settled in Reichenbach where they were one of 13 Jewish families. Bernhard worked as a shoemaker, and the couple raised three children. 1933-39: In a corner of his living room, Bernhard ran a small shop specializing in orthopedic shoes. Antisemitism was growing in Germany, but the townspeople of…
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Janka Glueck Gruenberger
ID CardJanka was one of seven children raised in a Yiddish-and Hungarian-speaking household by religious Jewish parents in the city of Kosice. In 1918, when she was 20 years old, Kosice changed from Hungarian to Czechoslovak rule. Three years later, Janka married Ludovit Gruenberger, and their three children were born Czech citizens. 1933-39: Janka was an accomplished milliner, and she helped her husband run a tailoring business from their apartment. Like many Jews in Kosice, Janka and Ludovit were upset when…
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Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim
ID CardFriedrich-Paul was born in the old trading city of Lübeck in northern Germany. He was 11 when his father was killed in World War I. After his mother died, he and his sister Ina were raised by two elderly aunts. After graduating from school, Friedrich-Paul trained to be a merchant. 1933-39: In January 1937 the SS arrested 230 men in Lübeck under the Nazi-revised criminal code's Paragraph 175, which banned sexual relations between men. Friedrich-Paul was imprisoned for 10 months. In 1938 he was…
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Willibald Wohlfahrt
ID CardWillibald was the youngest of six children born to Catholic parents in a village in the part of Austria known as Carinthia. Disillusioned with Catholicism, his father and mother became Jehovah's Witnesses when Willibald was an infant, and they raised their children in their new faith. His father became the leader of the local Jehovah's Witness congregation. 1933-39: Willibald lived in a beautiful area near lakes and mountains. The Wohlfahrts were active in Jehovah's Witness missionary work, even though…
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Hans Rudelsheim
ID CardHans was born to a Jewish family in the small Dutch town of Kampen. His father worked as a tailor, and he taught Hans about the tailoring trade. 1933-39: Hans was a skilled tailor, and an accomplished pianist as well. Inquisitive about all subjects, Hans loved to read and to keep abreast of current events. 1940-43: When the Jews in the Dutch provinces were ordered to relocate to Amsterdam in January 1942, the Rudelsheims complied. In early 1943, while in hiding with a Christian family near Leiden, Hans…
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Reichstag fire
FilmThis footage shows the Reichstag (German parliament) building on the day after it was set on fire. While the origins of the fire on February 27 are still unclear, Hitler blamed Communists for the incident. The Reichstag Fire Decree of February 28, 1933, suspended constitutional guarantees. Communist and Socialist deputies were expelled from the parliament. Shortly after the decree was issued, the Nazis established concentration camps for the internment of political opponents.
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Chaim Kozienicki
ArticleChildren's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Chaim Kozienicki.
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Berlin
ArticleBerlin was home to Germany’s largest Jewish community. It was also the capital of the Third Reich and the center for the planning of the "Final Solution."
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Tarnow
ArticleLearn about the prewar Jewish community of Tarnow, German occupation, deportations and killings of the Jewish population, ghettoization, and resistance.
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History of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
ArticleThe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in April 1993. Explore the history of the nation's memorial to the millions murdered during the Holocaust.
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Resistance inside Germany
ArticleSome individuals and groups in Germany attempted to resist Nazism, despite the risk of being caught and facing punishment. Learn more about their efforts.
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German and Austrian Jewish Refugees in Shanghai
ArticleSome German and Austrian Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution before WWII sought safety in Shanghai, which did not require entry visas. Learn about their experiences.
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German Military Oaths
ArticleIn Nazi Germany, German military personnel swore an oath directly to Adolf Hitler. Learn about the oath and its impact.
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International Holocaust Remembrance Day
ArticleJanuary 27, anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, is designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD).
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The Role of the German Police
ArticleTo implement their policies, the Nazis had help from individuals across Europe, including professionals in many fields. Learn about the role of the German police.
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King Christian X of Denmark
ArticleDid King Christian X of Denmark wear a yellow star in support of the Danish Jews? Read more about the historical truth behind the legend.
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Avraham Tory
ArticleLearn about the Kovno ghetto diary and other documents Avraham Tory saved in a secret archive that documented life in the ghetto.
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US Army Medic POW Diary Entry
Timeline EventApril 2, 1945. On this date, Anthony Acevedo wrote in his diary about his experience as a prisoner of war.
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Warsaw Polish Uprising
Timeline EventAugust 1, 1944. On this date, the Warsaw uprising began with the Polish Home Army rising against the Nazis in an attempt to liberate Warsaw.
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Revision of Paragraph 175
Timeline EventJune 28, 1935. On this date, the German government revised Paragraphs 175 and 175a, facilitating the persecution of gay men and men accused of homosexuality.
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Diaries and Journals
ProjectDiaries reveal some of the most heart-wrenching accounts of the Holocaust. They record the feelings of loss, fear, and sometimes hope of those facing extraordinary peril.
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The Nazi Persecution of Black People in Germany
ArticleRead about the Nazi persecution of Black people, as well as Black people's experiences in Germany before the Nazi rise to power.
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Manya Moszkowicz
ID CardManya was born in Chmielnik, a small Polish town that had a Jewish community dating back to the 16th century. Her father owned a furniture shop and her mother took care of the home. Manya had two younger brothers, David and Mordechai, and was surrounded by many close relatives. She attended both public and Hebrew schools and had many friends. 1933–39: In 1938 Manya's family moved to Sosnowiec, a larger city located near the German border. There she had her first experience with antisemitism. Signs…
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Beatrice Stern Pappenheimer recalls leaving Gurs and receiving assistance from the Children's Aid Society (OSE)
Oral HistoryBeatrice's family lost their textile business and home when the Nazis barred Jews from owning property. The family was deported to camps. Beatrice, her sister, and their mother were sent to Gurs. The Children's Aid Society (OSE) later placed the girls in homes and convents, where they feared Allied bomb attacks, but escaped the horrors of camp life. Their parents perished.
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Art and Survival: György Beifeld's Visual Memoir from the Russian Front, 1942–1943
ArticleGyörgy Beifeld, a Jewish conscript in the Hungarian army, created a visual memoir of his experiences on the eastern front in 1942–1943 as a member of a forced-labor battalion .
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Anti-Jewish Legislation in North Africa
ArticleThe Vichy regime introduced race laws to the North African territories in October of 1940. Learn about the impact of the laws on the region’s Jewish people.
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The German Military and the Holocaust
ArticleThe German military played a vital role in the consolidation of Nazi power and persecution and mass murder of Jews and other groups. Learn more
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Kristallnacht
ArticleOn November 9–10, 1938, the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of antisemitic violence. This became known as Kristallnacht or the "Night of Broken Glass." Learn more
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Kazimiera Banach Justynowa
ID CardKazimiera was born to Roman Catholic parents in the town of Mierzen. After graduating from a teacher's college in Staniatki, she married Wincenty Justyna, a secondary school teacher. The couple settled in the small industrial city of Piotrkow Trybunalski and raised three children, Jerzy (a boy), Danuta and Maria. Kazimiera worked as a school teacher. 1933-39: With their combined incomes the Justynas were able to buy a plot of land and build a house. The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and…
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Kato Fried
ID CardKato was born to Jewish parents in Smolnik, a small village in eastern Czechoslovakia. While still a young child, she moved with her parents and brother Theodore to Sighet, Romania. There in the Carpathian mountains, her father ran a lumber business that exported wood to Germany and Czechoslovakia. 1933–39: In the 1930s, the popular appeal of antisemitism and fascism increased in Romania. Leaders of the Iron Guard, the militant and violent Romanian fascist party, publicly proclaimed their support for…
