The Jews of Europe were the central target of the Holocaust. Around six million were killed. That number is not a guess. It is the result of decades of work by historians, demographers and statisticians using prewar census data, Nazi administrative records, deportation lists, postwar testimony and the surviving registers of Jewish communities. The figure is settled and the methodology is open to anyone who wants to read it. Anyone who tells you the number is invented or inflated is either lying or has not done the reading.
This part of the site sets out who those six million were. Not statistics, not abstractions, but communities with names, streets, schools, newspapers, theatres, synagogues, hospitals, cemeteries and ways of speaking that had taken root over centuries. The Jews of Berlin had been there since the thirteenth century. The Jews of Salonika spoke Ladino, a form of Spanish carried out of Iberia in 1492. The Jews of Warsaw and Łódź built two of the largest urban Jewish populations in the world. The Jews of Amsterdam had been a refuge for the Sephardim of Portugal. The Jews of Vienna had given Europe Freud and Mahler. The Jews of Rome had been continuously present in the city for more than two thousand years, the oldest Jewish community in Europe.
Before the war there were around nine and a half million Jews living between France and the Soviet border. By 1945 around two thirds were dead. The communities that survived as continuous entities, most of them in western Europe, were a fraction of what they had been. The communities that were obliterated, most of them in Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Greece and the lands of the former Habsburg empire, do not exist any more. There is no continuity. The buildings stand in some places, but the people are not there.
The pages below cover the world that was destroyed and the world inside the catastrophe. They cover the named cities, the cultural life, the resistance and the survival, the survivors who wrote, the artists and writers whose work shapes how the rest of us understand any of this, and the property that was taken and in some small part returned. They are written from the recognition that the dead were not numbers and the survivors were not symbols.
The Jews were not the only victims. Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, the disabled under T4, homosexual men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners and many others were murdered by the same regime. Those groups have their own pages in this section. But the Jews were the only group whom the regime intended to kill in their entirety, in every country it could reach. That is what makes the Jewish catastrophe the centre of the Holocaust as the word is used today, and that is why this section opens with them.
What is here
- Jewish Communities Before the Holocaust
- Jewish Life and Culture Before the War
- Inside the Catastrophe
- Survivor Voices and Memoirists
- Holocaust Books and Authors
- Art Looting and Restitution
- Righteous Among the Nations
- The British Dimension
- Art and Literature of the Holocaust
- The Numbers, How Six Million is Calculated
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards