Questions tagged [holocaust]
For questions about The Holocaust, the genocide committed by Nazi Germany under the direction of Adolf Hitler. For any other genocide, use the [genocide] tag. This is a sensitive and heavily-trolled topic (many questions are from holocaust deniers trying to get people to agree with them) so questions on this subject are held to an exceptionally strict standard.
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Why did Nazis burn 628 Belarusian villages to the ground?
In the movie Come and See, near the end it writes "628 Belarusian villages were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants".
I knew that the Nazis wanted to kill all of the Jews and ...
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After turndown by North America, did Jewish refugee ships try to secretly beach and live somewhere uninhabited?
Apology if my question looks childish. I want to give my students the best answer to their questions. I do not know how to answer this readily, so I asked you all.
One student brought up Weather ...
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Did ash rain in cities near Nazi concentration camps?
This scene in Schindler's List depicts ash falling in a city near a concentration camp. Are there written accounts or reports of this happening in Nazi cities?
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Why was the German Jewish population declining so much that some statisticians predicted its disappearance even before the 3rd Reich?
I was reading Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism where she claims that German Jewry was declining at such fast rates that for their raw numbers the Holocaust could be seen as statistically '...
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Is it true that Germans in World War 2 did not suffer punishment for refusing genocidal orders?
According to Norman Naimark's interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast (#248)
One of the shocking things that I learned just a few years ago when studying the Holocaust is that you could pull out. In ...
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How much were Jews allowed to take with them from Nazi Germany?
This Smithsonian Magazine article indicates that Jews could keep 8% of their assets (at least in some cases, and I am sure in practice there were obstacles to retaining even that), which is different ...
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Is there a basis for this tale of Eisenhower blessing & Patton's curse? [closed]
After discussion:
The "magical" part here is beside the point, I just quoted the legend. I'm insterested with the factual things, some of which might have happened. For example, it's very ...
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Did everyone have to carry identity papers in Nazi Germany?
Was everyone expected to carry identification on their person at all times in Germany after 1938 or only the Jews?
Certain groups (notably draft-age German males) had to apply for a Kennkarte, but ...
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What were Nazi policies around converts to Judaism?
While Judaism is not a missionary religion, it is possible to convert to Judaism. I can only assume (although I've not found any sources on this), that practicing converts were treated like any other ...
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Is there any evidence to corroborate the claim that Rudolf Höss was physically abused by the Allies after his capture?
The claim is from a book by an author called Rupert Butler.
Butler wrote an anti-Nazi book entitled Legions of Death. At the beginning of Legions of Death, Butler expresses his gratitude to two ...
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Did Nazi party members request exemption for their pre-war Jewish acquaintances?
So I heard this tale from a teacher many years ago, but cannot find much about it on the internet.
The story as far as I remember is as follows:
That Goebbels complained on many occasions about the ...
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Why did the Irish Free State suppress news of the Holocaust in 1945? Reaction once it became known?
Paul Bew's book Churchill and Ireland mentions the following in connection with the Irish Free State (forerunner of the present Republic of Ireland)'s Prime Minister De Valera's visit to the German ...
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Which names are correct? Mala vs Malka Zimetbaum and Edward vs Eduard Galinski?
I was deeply affected by the story of Mala Zimetbaum and Edward Galinski in Auschwitz.
However, the telegram informing about the escape of Mala mentions her name as Malka Zimetbaum.
The telegram ...
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Why didn't Hitler decide to wait until after winning WW2 to implement the final solution? [closed]
My question is based on the following assumptions.
Hitler believed he will eventually win WW2.
Hitler wanted to implement the final solution as part of the Nazi ideology.
Implementing the final ...
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Why has Witold Pilecki not been included in the Righteous Among the Nations? [closed]
Witold Pilecki was a Polish resistance fighter who volunteered to enter the Auschwitz I concentration camp. From there, he organised a resistance movement and gathered intelligence on the atrocities ...
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Did any relatives of Fritz Haber (the inventor of poison gas) die in the gas chambers?
I am sorry if this seems a ghoulish question. However, German scientist Fritz Haber (1860-1934), winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and co-inventor of the Haber-Bosch process to make nitrates ...
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Why were so many more Jewish men than Jewish women killed during the Holocaust?
On the Wikipedia page Jewish Women in the Holocaust, it says:
Of the estimated six million Jews who were killed1 during the Holocaust, 2 million of them were women.2
Conversely, this means that ...
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Did some Nazi death camp guards use Lee Enfield rifles?
I was watching the Netflix series The Devil Next Door and there was was video footage of a Nazi death camp. What was strange was that one of the guards appeared to be wielding a Lee Enfield No4 rifle ...
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Did Rafael Lemkin predict antisemitic mass murders before WWII?
I recall from reading Phillipe Sands East West Street that Raphael Lemkin (who would later term the word Genocide) drew paralells between the Armenian Genocide and the disenfranchisment of Jews in ...
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Would Lauri Törni have recieved the Waffen-SS blood type tattoo?
Lauri Allen Törni served with Finland during the Winter war, and due to being an officer, visited Vienna to obtain Waffen-SS training. Does this mean he would have had the SS blood type tattoo applied?...
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What publication claimed that Michael Jackson died in a nuclear holocaust?
I have a question about some paragraph in Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry. He writes that
Some years back, the parody of a New York tabloid was headlined: “Michael Jackson, 60 Million Others, Die ...
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What was Hitler’s personal involvement in the Holocaust? [closed]
For the purpose of this question, I define Holocaust as the campaign of extermination of the Jews, not the persecutions that preceded it like Kristallnacht.
I found that Hitler gave an order to start ...
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How were concentration and extermination camp guards recruited?
I'm interested in knowing how the Nazi regime went about hiring the guards and other camp personnel who did the dirty work.
Were they screened for sadism, callousness, obedience, or some other trait ...
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What was the state of the German rail system in 1944?
Could an SS officer get from Auschwitz to Berlin by train in July/August/September 1944? I need to know how Allied bombing might have disrupted the system.
For context: I am writing a mystery which ...
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How did the news of the reality Nazi concentration camps reach the United State's mainstream? What were the waves of awareness and when? [duplicate]
I just watched a documentary (I think it was called "We Were There" or "I Was There") featuring interviews of US soldiers that were Jewish and had helped liberate Nazi concentration camps. I was ...
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Did the Nazi regime always or often prioritize transport trains to the death camps over military transport?
Moishe Postone claims in his essay Anti‑Semitism and National Socialism (emphasis mine):
No functionalist explanation of the Holocaust and no scapegoat theory of anti‑Semitism can even begin to ...
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Does Hitler's "Mein Kampf" contain hints that he wanted to exterminate Jews on the scale that actually happened?
Imagine I live in 1933-1934 and read Hitler's "Mein Kampf". Is there anything in this book that would make me think the Nazis seriously intend to kill between 6 and 17 million Jews?
I haven't read ...
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How did Nazi concentration camp staff deal with survivors of gassings?
I've read a story about a woman who was put into a gas chamber and survived it.
In the most notorious of all, Auschwitz-Birkeanau,
she was herded naked into a gas chamber with hundreds
of ...
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Why was an SS commander dismissed and charged for the mistreatment of Jewish prisoners?
Amon Göth was relieved from his position at the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp and also charged for mistreating and killing Jews, along with the fact that he stole some of their property which ...
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Was there Nazi Collaboration at an Institutional level in Poland?
Following recent legal regulations in Poland prohibiting any association of Polish culpability with the Holocaust and concentration camps, the question that arises is whether there was any Polish ...
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Did more Jews live in Poland than any other country, prior to the Holocaust, because of how Polish laws and people regarded Jews?
Poland in 1900 and just before the Sho'ah ranks 1st in a list of nations by Jewish percentage of the population. [1]
Now of course in such a ranking that country is Israel.
Why did Jews migrate to and ...
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What color triangles did the different religious groups (those not Jews or JWs) wear in Nazi concentration camps?
I was recently reading through Anton Gill's 1989 book "The journey back from hell" regarding the experiences of concentration camp survivors.
On p.31 of this book he mentions that
There were ...
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How young were children left alive in Auschwitz?
I was reading a criticism in Wikipedia of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas which has a 9-year-old boy in the camp, but people apparently knowledgeable assert this is not realistic -- those who could not ...
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Why didn't Soviet Jews flee east ahead of the advancing Nazis?
As the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, incorporated conquered territories into Reichskommisariat Ostland, Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and military administration, they went on to implement the ...
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Nazis and Khazar Theory of Ashkenazi Jews [closed]
I understand that the Nazis made official exceptions for Karaite Jews although in practice this was not always followed and in fact they were not completely "exonerated" in Nazi "racial theory." My ...
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What was the status of the Polish Jews in Germany prior to WW2? [closed]
My understanding is that there were a large number of Polish Jews in Germany up to around the beginning of WW2 and they bore the brunt of nazi oppression at least at first (as opposed to Jews who were ...
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What aspects of Primo Levi's works are considered historically inaccurate?
I have read his books and I suspect he deliberately changed some details for literary purposes. Of course Holocaust deniers might question much of what he wrote but do serious historians also cast ...
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Is Himmler's memo about genocide authentic? Significant?
In this bio of Yehuda Bauer, we see mention of a Himmler memo to Hitler (dated May 25, 1940): Himmler states his rejection of "the Bolshevik method of physical annihilation of a people out of inner ...
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Treatment of homosexuals in Nazi Germany [closed]
I read that Nazi Germany only prosecuted gay men, not gay women. This really confuses me.
As to my understanding, the Nazis wanted to increase the Aryan population and exclusively gay men don't seem ...
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Did personnel from the "Aktion T4" ("euthanasia" murders) kill severely wounded Wehrmacht soldiers on the eastern front?
In Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes (English title: The Kindly Ones) the fictional protagonist meets, in 1943, a man employed with the Aktion T4, the organization behind the "euthanasia" ...
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When did the allies find out about the killing of Jews during WW2
When watching "Saving Private Ryan" I noticed during the opening scene that one of the soldiers (who is Jewish) gets emotional when he discovers a Hitler Youth knife, I could only assume it was ...
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Nuremberg Laws - Did they affect existing marriages between Jews and Non-Jews?
The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor states:
Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden.
Sexual relations between Jews and citizens of ...
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How did people die in Nazi extermination camps?
Before I get to the question, I'd like to point out that this is a particularly sensitive topic so thanks for letting me ask and hopefully remaining serious.
I know that at least 6 million people (1) ...
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Why was Folke Bernadotte assassinated by Zionist Jews, when he had helped many Jews to escape holocaust? [closed]
I was reading this Wikipedia article about the White Buses operation to rescue Jews from concentration camps.
It looks like, based on the article and other information that Folke Bernadotte was ...
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How might someone have gotten a note forwarded from a transport train headed to Auschwitz?
A relative who is no longer living told me that when her uncle (Jewish, living in hiding in France) was discovered and put on a train transport to Auschwitz, not long before liberation, he threw a ...
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Is there a good source for statistics of holocaust survivals?
Who had a higher chances of survival, men or women ?
Is there a good source for statistical observations of the survivals?
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Were defendants at the Nuremberg trial allowed to deny the holocaust?
In reply to a question on how to respond to Holocaust denial, I answered
At the Nuremberg trials the holocaust was one of the indictments. None of the defendants pretended that the holocaust had ...
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Where can I find information about Johannes Pohl?
I am looking for information about Dr Johannes Pohl. According to David G. Roskies in Against the Apocalypse, Pohl was a member of Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, which was tasked with cataloging ...
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Synagogue Scene in Der Ewige Jude: Looking for more information
This question is fairly technical, but I've run into a dead-end and the historians whom I have asked have been unable to help me. If anybody can direct me to something on this subject, I would very ...
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Was Jud Suss a veiled criticism of Hitler?
In 1940, Veit Harlan directed his most controversial movie: Jud Suss. The film takes various historical liberties, but otherwise depicts the life and death of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, Court Jew to ...
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