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The Blonder family lived in a two-room apartment in the back of a store. Edek was the third of eight children. His father eked out a meager living by tutoring students in Jewish subjects, and beginning in 1930 he worked distributing food vouchers to the poor. 1933-39: After graduating from secondary school, Edek was invited to play soccer professionally on the local Club Maccabi team, which was part of a Jewish soccer league. Club Maccabi arranged for him to attend trade school to learn cabinet making at…
Brandenburg was one of six killing centers the Nazis established to murder patients with disabilities under the so-called "euthanasia" program.
Explore Manya Friedmann’s biography and listen to her describe her experiences following the liberation of Auschwitz.
Léon Degrelle was an extreme right-wing Belgian politician and Nazi collaborator. After the war, he continued to spread pro-Nazi propaganda for decades. Learn more.
In January 1944, FDR established the War Refugee Board which was charged with “immediate rescue and relief of the Jews of Europe and other victims of enemy persecution.”
At Babyn Yar in late September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries perpetrated one of the largest massacres of World War II.
Lisa was one of three children born to a religious Jewish family. Following the German occupation of her hometown in 1939, Lisa and her family moved first to Augustow and then to Slonim (in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland). German troops captured Slonim in June 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Slonim, the Germans established a ghetto which existed from 1941 to 1942. Lisa eventually escaped from Slonim, and went first to Grodno and then to Vilna, where she joined the resistance movement. She…
Shony was born to religious Jewish parents in a small Transylvanian city. He began to learn the violin at age 5. His town was occupied by Hungary in 1940 and by Germany in 1944. In May 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz camp in Poland. He was transferred to the Natzweiler camp system in France and then to Dachau, where he was liberated by US troops in April 1945. In 1950, he immigrated to the United States, and became a composer and a professional violinist.
When German forces invaded Poland in September 1939, Ruth's father fled to eastern Poland. Upon the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, he fled to Lithuania. Ruth left Warsaw with two friends to find her father and later joined him in Vilna. After Soviet forces occupied Lithuania, Ruth and her father obtained transit visas for Japan, but only Ruth obtained a Soviet exit visa. Her father insisted she leave and not wait for him. Ruth traveled by the Trans-Siberian Railroad across the Soviet Union to…
Gary (Gerhard) was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1924. His father owned a men’s clothing store. As a child, Gary faced antisemitism from his peers. His family’s store was boycotted several times, and ultimately destroyed in 1938 during Kristallnacht. As the city prepared for tourists to arrive in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, Gary noticed anti-Jewish signs vanish from storefronts. In 1939, Gary and his parents escaped Germany after securing passage to Shanghai, China. His father died of illness in…
Leon Bass was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1925. He joined the US Army in 1943 and served as a member of the all-Black 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion attached to General Patton's Third Army. Leon's unit was involved in the Battle of the Bulge as well as the liberation of Buchenwald. After the war, Leon went on to receive his doctorate, teach, and speak about the Holocaust and racism. In this interview, Leon describes the his frustration with the discord between the United State's condemnation of Nazi…
Leon Bass was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1925. He joined the US Army in 1943 and served as a member of the all-Black 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion attached to General Patton's Third Army. Leon's unit was involved in the Battle of the Bulge as well as the liberation of Buchenwald. After the war, Leon went on to receive his doctorate, teach, and speak about the Holocaust and racism. In this interview, Leon describes his first experiences with the realities of war and death. He reflects upon his…
Leon Bass was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1925. He joined the US Army in 1943 and served as a member of the all-Black 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion attached to General Patton's Third Army. Leon's unit was involved in the Battle of the Bulge as well as the liberation of Buchenwald. After the war, Leon went on to receive his doctorate, teach, and speak about the Holocaust and racism. In this interview, Leon describes the racism and segregation he faced in the United States during the 1940s and how it…
The Nazi book burnings of 1933 sparked responses from anti-Fascist organizations, Jewish groups, and writers in the United States. Learn more.
The SA established a protective custody camp at Hainewalde in March 1933. Well-known journalist and writer Axel Eggebrecht was among its early prisoners.
Learn more about Jewish resistance efforts in the smaller ghettos of eastern Europe and the obstacles and limitations Jews faced.
Explore a timeline of key events related to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most notorious and widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times.
Learn about Fürstengrube subcamp of Auschwitz, including its establishment, administration, prisoner population, and forced labor and conditions in the camp.
Explore key dates in the history of the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto, which served multiple purposes during its existence from 1941-45.
The experiences of World War I and its aftermath would profoundly shape the attitudes and actions of leaders and ordinary people during the Holocaust.
Nazi Germany and its allies established over 44,000 concentration camps and incarceration sites during the Holocaust. Read about the Nazi camp system.
Kovno had a rich and varied Jewish culture. Learn about the Soviet and German occupations of Kovno, ghettoization, secret archives, and resistance in Kovno during WWII and the Holocaust.
How did Christians and their churches in Germany respond to the Nazi regime and its laws, particularly to the persecution of the Jews? Learn more.
Learn about the history of the Bergen-Belsen camp during WWII and the Holocaust until its liberation by British forces in April 1945.
US filmmaker and photographer Julien Bryan was one of the few western photographers left in Warsaw upon the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.
Learn more about the 1936 German Supreme Court decision on the Nuremberg Race Laws.
Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Learn about Austria’s capital, Vienna, which at the time was home to a large and vibrant Jewish community.
Even before joining the Axis alliance in 1940, Romania had a history of antisemitic persecution. Learn more about Romania before and during World War II.
Varian Fry was an American journalist who helped anti-Nazi refugees escape from France between 1940 and 1941. Learn about his rescue efforts.
Book burning is the ritual destruction by fire of books or other written materials. The Nazi burning of books in May 1933 is perhaps the most famous in history. Learn more.
Throughout history Jews have faced prejudice and discrimination, known as antisemitism. Learn more about the long history of antisemitism.
Learn more about how the Nazis identified and tattooed prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.
Explore a biography of Alfred Rosenberg, influential Nazi intellectual who held a number of important German state and Nazi Party posts.
Potential immigrants to the US from Nazi-occupied territory faced many obstacles, including restrictive quotas and complicated requirements for obtaining visas.
The German Armed Forces High Command, headed by Hitler, directed Germany’s armed forces before and during WWII. It was deeply complicit in the Holocaust and other crimes of the Third Reich.
Learn about the subcamps of the SS-established Herzogenbusch concentration camp in the Netherlands, including Amersfoort, Arnheim, Eindhoven, and others.
The Germans established the Blechhammer camp as a subcamp of Auschwitz in April 1941. Learn about the camp's history and conditions there.
Paul von Hindenburg was President of the Weimar Republic from 1925 until his death in 1934. Learn more about his life and role in the Nazi rise to power.
The Nazi regime established the Buchenwald camp in 1937. Learn about the camp’s prisoners, conditions there, forced labor, subcamps, medical experiments, and liberation.
During WWII, the Children’s Aid Society (OSE) operated 14 children's homes throughout France to save Jewish children from internment and deportation to killing centers.
Klaus Barbie, chief of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, was nicknamed the "Butcher of Lyon" for his brutal actions towards Jews and members of the French Resistance.
Under the Vichy regime, the Les Milles camp held foreign Jews before emigration or, in most cases, deportation to German concentration camps and killing centers.
Learn about the establishment of and conditions in Melk, a subcamp of the Mauthausen camp system in Austria.
Learn more about Rudolf (Rezső) Kasztner (1906-1957) during World War II and his controversial efforts to help refugees escape Hungary in 1944.
The Vélodrome d'Hiver (or Vél d'Hiv) roundup was the largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust. It took place in Paris on July 16–17, 1942.
The Grafeneck T4 Center was the first centralized killing center to be established by German authorities within the context of the Nazi “euthanasia,” or T4, program.
The Westerbork transit camp, located in the German-occupied Netherlands, served as a temporary collection point for Jews in the Netherlands before deportation.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest, symbolically most important Jewish uprising, and first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe.
Explore Jacob Wiener’s biography and learn about his experiences during Kristallnacht in Würzburg, Germany.
Oskar Schindler's actions to protect Jews during the Holocaust saved over 1,000 Jews from deportation. Learn more about Schindler's List.
We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.