Heritage

As Poland's economic situation deteriorated, Jews, like other Polish citizens, found it increasingly difficult to make a living. More and more Jews left the shtetlakh (market towns) for the large cities or tried to emigrate.

1939
In September 1939 Poland was invaded from two directions -- from the west by Nazi Germany and from the east by the Soviet Union.

The Nazis immediately instituted a brutal policy of occupation in the areas under their control. They murdered hundreds of cultural, communal, religious and political leaders (both Jewish and non-Jewish) to weaken any resistance that might develop against their regime.

The Soviets persecuted prominent Poles, deporting many to hard labor in Central Asia and murdering others. In 1940, they secretly executed more than 4,000 Polish army officers and buried them in a mass grave in the Katyn forest.
The Soviets, however, did not target Jews for persecution. As the Nazis enacted harsh anti-Jewish laws, many Polish Jews fled into Soviet-occupied areas. In November 1939, however, the border was sealed, severing this escape route.

1941
By 1940 the Nazis had begun to establish ghettos into which they compelled all Jews to move. Hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews (and later, Jews brought from Western Europe) were imprisoned in these crowded places and denied adequate food rations, health care, and other basic resources. Many were also pressed into forced labor.
Thousands died from starvation and disease; others were shot by Nazi overseers when they were caught trying to smuggle food into the ghettos or attempting to escape.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact collapsed in the summer of 1941, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Soon all of Poland lay under Nazi control.

As they swept east, the Nazis began a more systematic campaign of murdering Jews. They rounded up entire Jewish communities and shot them en masse. By the end of the year, tens of thousands of Jews had been murdered.

1950s to 1960s
The approximately 100,000 Jews living in Communist Poland did not suffer from the sort of vicious anti-Semitism that prevailed in the USSR in the early 1950s. Hebrew and Zionist activity was suppressed and the Jewish Labor Bund was outlawed in 1949. But other Jewish organizations, such as schools, newspapers, and theaters, were allowed to exist, albeit under tight government control.

During the Gomulka regime (1956-1970), several anti-Semitic incidents occurred and the official government press began printing anti-Jewish propaganda. However, during this same period, thanks to activities of the Polish government, many Jews who had once been Polish citizens but had found themselves trapped in the USSR were allowed to emigrate to Poland. The majority of them came with the intention of further emigrating to Israel.

In 1958-1959, about 50,000 Jews, many of them long-established residents of Poland, took advantage of the government's permission to emigrate, reducing the Jewish population of Poland to some 30,000.

1968
The anti-Semitism of the Gomulka regime intensified in the late 1960s. In an effort to distract the factions of the Polish Communist Party who wished to oust him, Gomulka whipped up popular anti-Semitic sentiment by pointing to the many Jews who held public posts and civil service jobs. He declared Jews to be "rootless cosmopolitans" and dismissed all Jews from public office and government jobs.

All Jewish schools and organizations were disbanded in 1968, and the Yiddish press became subject to harsh new restrictions. Anti-Semitic propaganda was featured in the newspapers and over the airwaves.

In this threatening atmosphere, almost the entire remaining Jewish population of Poland decided to emigrate. Poland, which barely thirty years before had the largest Jewish population in the world, soon became home to only a small remnant -- a few thousand mostly elderly Jews.

Nazi Germany

1933 to 1937
In March 1933 the Nazis gained control of the German government through a combination of political intrigue and terrorism.

The Nazis had long included anti-Semitism as a key element of their world-view, and they almost immediately instituted anti-Jewish policies.

A government-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses was launched. A series of book-burnings were organized of Jewish and other writers deemed "decadent" by the Nazis. Anti-Jewish legislation barred Jews from many professions and other arenas of public life. Jews were ordered to carry special documents stamped with a "J" for "Jew."

In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of most remaining civil rights. Many Jews began seeking ways to emigrate from Germany.

Nazi Germany
Kristallnacht
November 9-10, 1938

On the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis staged an systematic program against German Jews.

96 Jews were killed, over 1,000 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were looted, and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps.

Soon after Kristallnacht, new laws banished Jewish students from public schools and forced Jews to sell their businesses.
In the face of such destruction and exclusion, many Jews desperately tried to leave the country. In the ten months following Kristallnacht, about 150,000 Jews left Germany. Only 200,000 Jews -- about one-third of the original population -- remained.

Dachau
1933 to 1939

Dachau was established shortly after the Nazis came to power as a prison camp for those they considered enemies of their regime.

Trade unionists, communists, socialists, and Jews were the first to be incarcerated at the camp. Between 1933 and 1939, tens of thousands of prisoners passed through its gates. Inmates served as slave laborers. Many died from hunger and brutal treatment; others from random executions or suicide.

Dachau was but the first of many concentration camps that the Nazis established in Germany. Run by the SS, it was a training ground for personnel who later served in the concentration camps and death camps established by the Nazis in Poland during World War II. Guards at Dachau were drilled to regard prisoners as subhuman and encouraged to treat them sadistically.

Italy
1922 to Late 1930s

When Mussolini's Fascist Party came to power in Italy in 1922, there were more than a few Jews among its members. Jews, however, were also well-represented in the anti-Fascist movement. At first, the Fascist government did not take a consistent anti-Semitic position. At least, it did not enact anti-Jewish laws or seek to remove Jews from public life. With the strengthening of ties with Nazi Germany in 1937, however, Mussolini's government changed its policy, and began to actively promote anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitic propaganda filled the newspapers, Jews were barred from institutions of higher learning, and foreign Jews were expelled from the country. New anti-Jewish laws, modeled after those in Nazi Germany, followed, aimed at segregating Jews from other Italians.

Nuremberg

The Nuremberg Laws: 1935
Germany's Jews were stripped of most of their remaining civil rights by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, so called because Hitler chose to announce their passage at a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.
The laws completed the legal, political, and social severance of the Jews from other Germans by depriving Jews of German citizenship and prohibiting marriage and extramarital relations between Jews and Germans.

War Crimes Trials
1945 to 1946
At war's end, the Allies followed through on their threat to prosecute high-ranking Nazis for wartime atrocities and began a series of trials at Nuremberg.
24 Nazi officials were tried for crimes against humanity, including the genocidal campaign that had been waged against the Jews.
Few of the defendants admitted any responsibility for the evils perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Most, however, were found guilty by the international court. Twelve were sentenced to death, and ten of them were hanged on October 16, 1946. (Hermann Goering committed suicide before he could be executed; Martin Bormann, tried in absentia, was presumed to be in hiding).

Vienna

1919 to 1932
Many of the Jewish refugees from Galicia and other parts of Poland who had flooded into Vienna during the war settled here.
The teenagers among them had formed Zionist youth groups, such as Hashomer Hatzair, which, as their members returned to Poland or emigrated, grew into worldwide organizations.

These organizations and other Zionist groups formed the core of the growing Zionist movement in Vienna. Zionist leaders, such as Robert Stricker, were elected to the Austrian parliament. By 1932, Zionists were the strongest political force among Viennese Jewry and held the majority of seats on Jewish communal boards.

1938-1942
Vienna was home to the majority of Austrian Jews. Following the Nazi Anschluss (German annexation) in March 1938, many synagogues were destroyed, Jewish businesses were confiscated, and Jews were barred from working in their professions or participating in most arenas of public life. Viennese Jews were beaten up in the streets and subjected to other forms of humiliation, such as being ordered to scrub streets while passers-by jeered.
Many Viennese Jews succeeded in emigrating before the beginning of the war. Those who remained were almost all sent off to death camps in a series of deportations which continued until autumn 1942, when it was officially announced that Vienna's Jewish community no longer existed.

Auschwitz

1940 to 1941
Auschwitz was initially established in June 1940 as a prison camp. Its first inmates were Polish and German political prisoners. Later, after Germany's invasion of the USSR, Soviet prisoners-of-war (POWs) were also incarcerated here.
As part of the Nazis' search for a more efficient means of mass killing, an experimental gas chamber was erected at Auschwitz in June 1941. Its first victims were a group of Soviet POWs, 900 of whom were gassed to death on September 3, 1941.

1945
When the Soviets liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found only a dying, starving remnant of the thousands of prisoners the camp had once held.
Most of the 67,012 prisoners present at the last Auschwitz roll call on January 17 had been sent on forced death marches by the Nazis as the Soviet Army approached. The Nazis had also blown up crematoria and burnt documents in a frantic effort to conceal their crimes.

Warsaw
1940-1941

Warsaw -- home to the largest Jewish population in Europe -- became the site of the largest ghetto established by the Germans in Poland. In November 1940, the Germans forced all non-Jews to move out of a section of the city and established a ghetto for Jews here.

400,000 Jews were crowded into a small area. An average of 13 people lived in each room in the ghetto. A wall was erected around the ghetto and Jews were imprisoned inside, forbidden to leave except as members of forced labor battalions. Almost all Jewish institutions, schools, organizations, synagogues, and businesses were disbanded.

In an attempt to starve as many Jews as possible, the Nazis cut their food rations to levels below those necessary to sustain life.

By 1942, corpses were a common sight on the streets. In an effort to survive, many ghetto inhabitants took up smuggling as a livelihood. Even children became involved, and many youngsters were among those shot for little more than smuggling a few potatoes or a loaf of bread into the ghetto.

Munich
1923

In 1923, as Germany's economic crisis deepened and the government appeared in danger of collapse, Adolf Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party attempted a coup.
At a gathering in a Munich beer hall, they kidnapped local Bavarian officials and tried to force them to cede control of the government to the Nazis. They hoped that this act would inspire similar revolts around the country and lead to the fall of the government in Berlin.

The "Beer Hall Putsch," as it is known, was a failure. Hitler and his co-conspirators were arrested and imprisoned and the Nazi Party was outlawed in Bavaria. Hitler used his prison time, however, to write his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he delineated key elements of Nazism, including its anti-Semitic ideology.