title: History of the Jews during World War II
text: # History of the Jews during World War II
  
  Part of a series on :
  
  The Holocaust :
  
  Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944 :
  
  Responsibility
  
  Nazi Germany
  
  People
  
  Major perpetrators
  
  Adolf Hitler
  
  Heinrich Himmler
  
  Heinrich Müller
  
  Reinhard Heydrich
  
  Adolf Eichmann
  
  Odilo Globocnik
  
  Theodor Eicke
  
  Richard Glücks
  
  Ernst Kaltenbrunner
  
  Rudolf Höss
  
  Christian Wirth
  
  Joseph Goebbels
  
  Ion Antonescu
  
  László Ferenczy
  
  Philippe Pétain
  
  Organizations
  
  Nazi Party
  
  Gestapo
  
  Schutzstaffel (SS)
  
  Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV)
  
  Einsatzgruppen
  
  Sturmabteilung (SA)
  
  Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT)
  
  Wehrmacht
  
  Trawniki men
  
  Collaborators during World War II
  
  Nazi ideologues :
  
  Early policies
  
  Racial policy
  
  Nazi eugenics
  
  Nuremberg Laws
  
  Haavara Agreement
  
  Madagascar Plan
  
  Forced euthanasia :
  
  Victims
  
  Jews
  
  Romani people (Gypsies)
  
  Poles
  
  Soviet POWs
  
  Slavs in Eastern Europe
  
  Homosexuals
  
  People with disabilities :
  
  Ghettos
  
  Białystok
  
  Budapest
  
  Kaunas
  
  Kraków
  
  Łódź
  
  Lublin
  
  Lwów
  
  Minsk
  
  Riga
  
  Warsaw
  
  Vilnius
  
  Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland
  
  List of selected ghettos :
  
  Camps
  
  Nazi extermination camps
  
  Auschwitz II-Birkenau
  
  Bełżec
  
  Chełmno
  
  Jasenovac
  
  Majdanek
  
  Sajmište
  
  Sobibor
  
  Treblinka
  
  Nazi concentration camps
  
  Auschwitz I
  
  Bergen-Belsen
  
  Bogdanovka
  
  Buchenwald
  
  Dachau
  
  Dora
  
  Gonars (Italy)
  
  Gross-Rosen
  
  Herzogenbusch
  
  Janowska
  
  Kaiserwald
  
  Mauthausen-Gusen
  
  Neuengamme
  
  Rab
  
  Ravensbrück
  
  Sachsenhausen
  
  Salaspils
  
  Stutthof
  
  Transnistria (Romania)
  
  Theresienstadt
  
  Uckermark
  
  Warsaw
  
  Transit and collection camps
  
  Belgium
  
  Breendonk
  
  Mechelen
  
  France
  
  Gurs
  
  Drancy
  
  Italy
  
  Bolzano
  
  Netherlands
  
  Amersfoort
  
  Westerbork
  
  Slovakia
  
  Sereď
  
  Divisions
  
  SS-Totenkopfverbände
  
  Concentration Camps Inspectorate
  
  Politische Abteilung
  
  Sanitätswesen
  
  Extermination methods
  
  Gas van
  
  Gas chamber
  
  Extermination through labour
  
  Einsatzgruppen
  
  Human medical experimentation :
  
  Atrocities
  
  Pogroms
  
  Kristallnacht
  
  Bucharest
  
  Dorohoi
  
  Iaşi
  
  Izieu
  
  Szczuczyn
  
  Jedwabne
  
  Plungė
  
  Kaunas
  
  Lviv (Lvov)
  
  Marseille
  
  Tykocin
  
  Vel' d'Hiv
  
  Wąsosz
  
  Einsatzgruppen
  
  Babi Yar
  
  Bydgoszcz
  
  Częstochowa
  
  Kamianets-Podilskyi
  
  Ninth Fort
  
  Odessa
  
  Piaśnica
  
  Ponary
  
  Rumbula
  
  Erntefest
  
  "Final Solution"
  
  Wannsee Conference
  
  Mogilev Conference
  
  Operation "Reinhard"
  
  Holocaust trains
  
  Extermination camps
  
  End of World War II
  
  Wola massacre
  
  Death marches :
  
  Resistance
  
  Auschwitz Protocols
  
  Vrba–Wetzler report
  
  Czesław Mordowicz
  
  Jerzy Tabeau
  
  Rudolf Vrba
  
  Alfréd Wetzler
  
  Bricha
  
  Jewish partisans
  
  Sonderkommando photographs
  
  Witold Pilecki
  
  Resistance movement in Auschwitz
  
  Związek Organizacji Wojskowej
  
  Witold's Report
  
  Ghetto uprisings
  
  Warsaw
  
  Białystok
  
  Łachwa
  
  Częstochowa :
  
  International responseJoint Declaration by Members of the United Nations
  
  Auschwitz bombing debate
  
  MS St. Louis
  
  Nuremberg trials
  
  Denazification :
  
  Aftermath
  
  Bricha
  
  Displaced persons
  
  Survivors
  
  Central Committee of the Liberated Jews
  
  Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany :
  
  Lists
  
  Holocaust survivors
  
  Deportations of French Jews to death camps
  
  Survivors of Sobibor
  
  Timeline of Treblinka extermination camp
  
  Victims of Nazism
  
  Rescuers of Jews
  
  Memorials and museums :
  
  Resources
  
  Bibliography
  
  List of books about Nazi Germany
  
  The Destruction of the European Jews
  
  Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos
  
  Functionalism versus intentionalism :
  
  Remembrance
  
  Days of remembrance
  
  Memorials and museums
  
  Righteous Among the Nations :
  
  vte :
  
  The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa (pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and Italian Libya). The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
  
  Leading to World War II, nearly all Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. As the war started, massacres of Jews took place originally as part of Operation Tannenberg against the Polish nation. The much larger and methodical mass killings of Jews began with the onset of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Led by Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police battalions, the destruction of European Jews took place with the active participation of local Auxiliary Police including Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian units.
  
  ## History
  
  The following figures of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Germany) show the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe by (pre-war) country as percentage points: :
  
  | Country | Estimated Pre-War Jewish population | Estimated killed | Percent killed |
  | - | - | - | - |
  | Poland | 3,400,000 | 3,000,000 | 88.25% |
  | Soviet Union (excl. Baltic states) | 3,000,000 | 1,000,000 | 33.3% |
  | Romania | 757,000 | 287,000 | 38% |
  | Hungary | 445,000 | 270,000 | 60.7% |
  | Czechoslovakia | 357,000 | 260,000 | 73% |
  | Germany | 500,000 | 165,000 | 33% |
  | Lithuania | 150,000 | 145,000 | 96.7% |
  | Netherlands | 140,000 | 102,000 | 72.9% |
  | France | 300,000 | 76,000 | 25.33% |
  | Latvia | 93,500 | 70,000 | 74.9% |
  | Austria | 206,000 | 65,000 | 31.5% |
  | Yugoslavia | 68,500 | 60,000 | 87.6% |
  | Greece | 70,000 | 58,800 | 84% |
  | Belgium | 90,000 | 25,000 | 27.8% |
  | Italy | 46,000 | 7,500 | 16.3% |
  | Luxembourg | 3,600 | 1,200 | 33.3% |
  | Estonia | 4,300 | 1,000 | 23% |
  | Norway | 1,800 | 758 | 42.1% |
  | Bulgaria | 48,400 | 142 | 0.3% |
  | Denmark | 7,800 | 116 | 1.49% |
  | Albania | 200 | 100 | 50% |
  | Finland | 2,200 | 7 | 0.32% |
  | Total | 9,689,500 | 5,594,623 | 57.74% |
  
  Before the onset of war, the first pogrom in Nazi Germany was Kristallnacht, often called Pogromnacht, or "night of broken glass," in which Jewish homes were ransacked in numerous German cities along with 11,000 Jewish shops, towns and villages, as civilians and SA stormtroopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." The main part of the rioting took place on 9–10 November 1938. Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; and 1,668 synagogues ransacked with 267 set on fire. Following Operation Barbarossa launched on 22 June 1941, in the city of Lviv in the occupied territory of the General Government, Ukrainian nationalists organized two large pogroms in July 1941, in which around 6,000 Jews were murdered.
  
  In Lithuania, local militant groups engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms on July 25 and 26, 1941 around Kaunas even before the Nazi forces arrived, killing about 3,800 Jews and burning synagogues and Jewish shops. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iași pogrom in Romania, in which as many as 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials.
  
  By December 1941, Adolf Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). Dr. Josef Bühler urged Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the "Final Solution" in the General Government. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps: Auschwitz, Birkenau was the Extermination Camp site Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka II. Sebastian Haffner published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the United States, but that his withdrawal and apparent calm thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goal—the extermination of the Jews.
  
  Even as the German Nazi war machine faltered in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers, and industrial resources were still being heavily diverted away from the war and towards the death camps. By the end of the war, more than half of Jewish population of Europe had been murdered in the Holocaust. Poland, home of the largest Jewish community in Europe before the war, had over 90% of its Jewish population, or about 3,000,000 Jews, murdered by the Nazis. Greece, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and Latvia each had over 70% of their Jewish population murdered.
  
  Hungary and Albania lost around half of their Jewish populations, the Soviet Union, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg lost over one third of its Jews, Belgium and France each saw around a quarter of their Jewish populations murdered.
  
  During the war, Spain became an unlikely haven for several thousand Jews. They were mainly from Western Europe, fleeing deportation to concentration camps from occupied France, but also Sephardic Jews from Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary. Trudy Alexy refers to the "absurdity" and "paradox of refugees fleeing the Nazis' Final Solution to seek asylum in a country where no Jews had been allowed to live openly as Jews for over four centuries."
  
  ## Jews in the Allied Forces
  
  Approximately 1.5 million Jews served in the regular Allied militaries during World War II.
  
  Approximately 550,000 American Jews served in the various branches of the United States Armed Forces. Roughly 52,000 received U.S. military awards. Another 500,000 served in the Red Army, and more than 160,000 earned citations, with over 150 receiving the Hero of the Soviet Union award. Some 100,000 Jews served in the Polish Army during the German invasion, and thousands served in the Free Polish Forces, including about 10,000 in Anders' Army. Over 60,000 Jews served in the British Armed Forces (excluding dominion or colonial personnel), including 14,000 in the Royal Air Force and 15,000 in the Royal Navy. About 30,000 Jews from Mandatory Palestine also served in the British military, including 5,500 who served in the Jewish Brigade, a military formation composed of Jewish soldiers from Palestine led by British-Jewish officers. About 17,000 Canadian Jews served in the Canadian Armed Forces.
  
  Jewish partisans also fought throughout occupied Europe and were organized into groups such as the Bielski partisans, United Partisan Organization and the Parczew partisans. Jewish resistance fighters took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
  
  