Nazi Germany
1939 to 1945

During World War II, the remaining Jews of Germany were deported to Poland and other Eastern European countries -- at first to ghettos, such as Lodz, Minsk, Riga, and Kovno (Kaunas); and later to death camps, such as Auschwitz.

Some of the community's more prominent figures were interned in Theresienstadt (Terezin), a camp the Nazis established for VIPs in Czechoslovakia.

When Germany was occupied by Allied forces in 1945, only about 19,000 Jews remained in the country. Most of them had survived because their non-Jewish spouses had struggled to defend them. A few others had survived in hiding.

Auschwitz
1942 to 1945

By early 1942, Auschwitz was a full-fledged death camp and a huge slave labor camp and industrial complex. Jews from all over Europe were transported here and murdered by the trainload in the section of the camp known as Birkenau.

Auschwitz was the largest of the death camps established by the Nazis in Poland. By 1945, when the camp was liberated by the Soviet Army, an estimated 1.5 million Jews had been murdered here. Tens of thousands of other people were also murdered in Auschwitz, including 75,000 Poles and 21,000 Gypsies.

Death at Auschwitz came in many forms. Most children were gassed immediately upon arrival, but some were spared to serve as guinea pigs in painful medical experiments. Adults were also experimented upon. Thousands perished from hunger, disease, and overwork while serving as slave labor for German-owned factories in the camp.

In 1944, women inmates working in a munitions factory smuggled out gunpowder to a group of Sonderkommando (the special detail of prisoners assigned to work in the gas chambers and crematoria). The Sonderkommando used this powder to blow up one of Auschwitz's four crematoria in October 1944.

Warsaw
1942-1943

In July 1942, Nazis began the first of a series of large-scale deportations of Jews from Warsaw to extermination camps. Rumors of the certain death that awaited the deportees in Treblinka and Auschwitz reached the ghetto and convinced some activists that an armed revolt, even if suicidal, was the only acceptable course of action.

In April 1943 a group of Jewish fighters (most of them young adults and teenagers) mounted one of first and longest armed uprisings against the Nazis anywhere in Europe. Armed with only a few guns and homemade bombs, the fighters managed to fend off the Germans for 28 days. During the uprising the Nazis continued to round up Jews for deportation and began systematically burning the ghetto to the ground. By summer 1943, the ghetto, had been reduced to a field of rubble, empty of all inhabitants.

Treblinka
1942-1943

Modeled after two existing death camps, Belzec and Sobibor, Treblinka II was established in July, 1942 as a death camp one mile from the existing Treblinka forced-labor camp.

More Jews were murdered at Treblinka II than at any other camp except Auschwitz. It was the designated place of death for many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. During a single month, July 1942, 66,701 Jews from Warsaw were gassed here. By October, 1943, more than 780,000 Jews had been murdered in Treblinka's gas chambers.

In August 1943, Treblinka II was the site of a revolt by a group of Jewish prisoners, who managed to kill several SS guards. A few managed to escape, but most were killed and the uprising was suppressed.

The Nazis closed Treblinka II shortly thereafter and tried to eradicate all signs it had ever existed.

Chelmno
1941-1945

Chelmno was the first camp devised by the Nazis solely for the purpose of exterminating Jews.

In December 1941 the SS conducted an experiment to evaluate the use of mobile gas vans as a means of quickly killing large numbers of people. Several thousand Jews from neighboring villages were brought to the nearby town of Kolo by rail. They were then sealed into trucks and asphyxiated by gas fumes as they were driven to the woods near Chelmno where their bodies were buried in mass graves.

The Nazis judged the experiment a success and switched from mass shooting to mass gassing as their main method for murdering Jews. Chelmno was but the first of six death camps established in Poland.

By the time the camp ceased operation in January 1945, an estimated 310,000 Jewish victims, including over 70,000 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto, had been murdered here.

Lodz
1940-1945

One of the largest ghettos established by the Nazis in Poland was in the industrial city of Lodz. In 1940, the authorities began forcing Jews from Lodz and neighboring communities to move into one section of the city that they designated as a Jewish ghetto.

When it was established in 1940, the ghetto held over 160,000 inhabitants. In 1941, thousands of Jews deported from Czechoslovakia and Germany were shipped into the ghetto, straining its already inadequate resources.

Food was scarce, disease was rampant, and the mortality rate was high. During the first six months of 1941 alone, over 5,000 died from starvation and disease.
The Nazis began emptying out the ghetto in 1942, deporting its population to death camps, particularly Chelmno and Auschwitz. Many of the early victims were those incapable of work -- the elderly, sick, and young children.

The Lodz ghetto's leadership and some of its inhabitants hoped that they would be spared deportation because of the factories that had been established in the ghetto to produce uniforms and other goods for the German war effort. But despite German promises, the deportations went on. By summer 1944, the factories were liquidated and the ghetto's remaining inhabitants -- some 68,500 Jews -- were deported to Auschwitz.

Theresienstadt, Terezin
1942-1944

At first, some Czech Jewish leaders reluctantly supported the establishment of Theresienstadt as a ghetto, hoping that this would mean that Czech Jewry would not be deported from the country to an unknown fate further east.

But Theresienstadt soon served as a major transit point for deportation to death camps in Poland, especially to Auschwitz after October 1942. Tens of thousands of Jews were deported to death camps from Theresienstadt between 1942 and late 1944.

The Nazis made special use of Theresienstadt to conceal their program of genocide from the rest of the world. They depicted the ghetto as a "model settlement" and in 1944, even invited Red Cross inspectors to visit. The visitors were taken on a carefully orchestrated tour of phoney banks, shops, cafes, kindergartens, and schools, and shown hastily planted flower gardens. Several hundred Jews were carefully chosen to participate in the charade and in a propaganda film, "The Fuehrer Gives the Jews a City," which portrayed the ghetto as an ordinary settlement.

When the Red Cross visit was over and the film completed, all the Jewish actors were deported to Auschwitz, along with Theresienstadt's Jewish administration and most of the ghetto's children.

Majdanek
1942-1944

The Majdanek concentration camp was turned into an extermination camp in autumn 1942. An estimated 120,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers.

18,000 people were murdered on November 3, 1943 alone, a day of slaughter dubbed by the SS "the harvest festival."
Majdanek was liberated by the Soviet Army in July, 1944.

Belzec
1942-1943

Belzec, the site of a forced labor camp for Polish Jews in 1939 and 1940, was reestablished as a death camp in 1942. 600,000 Jews were murdered in this camp's gas chambers.

In 1943, as part of a Nazi attempt to conceal wartime atrocities, Belzec and other places of mass execution were destroyed. Corpses were exhumed and cremated, and gas chambers were bulldozed. The site of Belzec was turned into farmland to further conceal its history as a death camp.