The November Pogrom was an anti-Jewish assault that took place across Nazi Germany on November 9–10, 1938. During the pogrom, hundreds of Jews were murdered, more than 1,400 synagogues throughout Germany and Austria were damaged or burned down, and Jewish shops and businesses were looted and destroyed.
Operation Reinhard was a codename for the Nazi scheme to exterminate the 2,284,000 Jews living in the five districts of the Generalgouvernement. The scheme was named after Reinhard Heydrich, the main coordinator of the "Final Solution" in Europe, who had been assassinated by Czech resistance fighters. Three extermination camps were established for its implementation: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
In their implementation of the "Final Solution," the Nazis forcibly uprooted millions of Jews from their homes and sent them to their deaths. This systematic campaign marked a tragic and devastating chapter in history, annihilating Jewish communities that had thrived for centuries across areas occupied by Nazi Germany.
On 21 September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police, sent a Schnellbrief in which he outlined the policy regarding Jews in occupied Poland. It was determined that Jews should be transferred from towns and villages to cities where ghettos would be established. Within a year of Poland’s occupation, most of its Jews were imprisoned in enclosed ghettos, usually in the poorest and most rundown neighborhoods.
The Łódź ghetto was established on 30 April 1940. It was the second-largest ghetto in German-occupied territory, and also the most isolated from its surroundings and other ghettos. Approximately 60,000 Jews were incarcerated there, joined later by tens of thousands of Jews from the region and from the Reich, as well as Sinti and Roma.
In 1941, the Germans established a transit camp and ghetto in the town of Theresienstadt (Terezín) in Czechoslovakia. By the time it was liberated on 8 May 1945, over 155,000 Jews had passed through Theresienstadt; approximately 35,000 were murdered in the ghetto, and some 88,000 were deported to the extermination camps.
Kovno, Lithuania, was occupied by the Germans in June 1941. Even before their arrival, the Lithuanians had carried out murderous pogroms against the Jews, which continued in the presence of the Germans. Anti-Jewish decrees were issued, and some 30,000 Jews were ordered to move into a ghetto, which was sealed in August 1941.
In June 1941, the city was occupied by the Germans. Approximately 8,000 Jews were deported to labor camps, while 200 joined the partisans. By the end of the ghetto’s existence, some 100,000 Jews from Vilnius and the vicinity had been murdered.
In Warsaw, Poland, the Nazis established the largest ghetto in all of Europe. On 16 November 1940 the Jews were forced inside the area of the ghetto which stood on just 2.4% of the city’s surface area. Masses of refugees who had been transported to Warsaw brought the ghetto population up to 450,000.
On 19 April 1943, the eve of Passover, the fighting groups and ghetto inhabitants barricaded themselves in bunkers and hideouts, their demonstrations of resistance taking the Germans by surprise. In response, the Germans began to burn down the buildings. The Jews fought for a month until the Germans took over the focal points of resistance.
Jews from across Europe were deported to the camp. Upon arrival, they underwent a selection process. Most were sent directly to the gas chambers, and a small number were selected for forced labor, either within the main camp or in Auschwitz’s sub-camps. Some prisoners were also subjected to brutal medical experiments.
Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941 with the massive military invasion of the Soviet Union. Four special operations divisions (Einsatzgruppen) – A, B, C and D – operated behind the corps that took part in the campaign against the USSR. The units were made up of SS, police and auxiliaries mobilized from the local population.
In a world of total moral collapse there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values, risking their lives to save Jews by hiding them in their homes, providing false papers and assisting their escape: the Righteous Among the Nations.
In May 1942, the BBC in London broadcast accurate details about the murder of Poland’s Jews, and repeated the transmission one month later. The information that reached the free world was reliable and accessible. In December 1942, the Allied powers issued a joint statement declaring that the Germans would be held accountable for the murder of the Jews being carried out on European soil, but political and military leaders remained adamantly focused on winning the war.
Jewish organizations attempted to rescue Jews by getting them out of the camps, by ransoming them for money, by placing them in children’s institutions or private homes, and by organizing their emigration.
The partisan movement refers to resistance groups and fighters who opposed occupying forces during World War II. Wide-scale partisan warfare was waged against the Germans in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The vast areas with thick forests and marshland were well-suited for partisan combat.
The family camps were one of the unique phenomena of the partisan movement in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. These units began to emerge in 1942 as a result of the mass extermination of the Jews and the escape of some survivors into the forests. Later, with the expansion of German punitive policies, the phenomenon of family camps ceased to be exclusively Jewish.
Towards the end of the war, as the German army was retreating on all fronts, Nazi Germany began to evacuate the camps near the Eastern Front and march the inmates westward. Not yielding despite their visible defeat, the Nazis were determined to prevent the survivors from falling into Allied hands.
With Nazi Germany’s surrender on 8 May 1945, joy spread worldwide. Yet, for the Jewish people, liberation had come too late. The scale of destruction was staggering — six million Jews, about one-third of world Jewry, had been murdered.
After World War II, an International Military Tribunal put senior Nazis on trial in Nuremberg for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Trials were the first in history where regime, government and military leaders responsible for crimes committed in their countries, were judged.
The Eichmann Trial was held in 1961 in Jerusalem. Unlike the Nuremberg Trials, which relied extensively on written documents, the Eichmann Trial put survivors at center stage.
Until the Last Jew
In October 1940, the Statut des Juifs (Jewish Statute) was issued. It deprived Jews of their civil rights, defined their status, excluded them from French society, denied them livelihoods, incarcerated many of them and required their registration with the police.
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched "Operation Barbarossa," a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. This was a turning point in World War II and in the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust. With this offensive, the systematic mass murder of Jews began.
With Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, the annihilation of Baltic Jewry began. Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators murdered most of the 350,000 Jews in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; fewer than 5% survived.
Italy was ruled by a Fascist government from 1922. Until the mid-1930s, Italian Jews enjoyed equal status with other citizens, but behind the scenes Fascist leaders held antisemitic views and prepared the ground for excluding Jews from society. Out of 44,500 Jews in Italy, 7,680 were murdered during the Holocaust.
The occupation of France and the establishment of the antisemitic Vichy regime brought 415,000 North African Jews into the orbit of persecution.
Through Their Eyes
During the Holocaust the family unit was severely compromised, and parents and children were forced to grapple with separation and loss. Nevertheless, amid the deprivation and fear, people clung to their families as a source of cohesion and stability, and the hope of reuniting gave Jews in the camps the strength to go on. Tragically, after the war survivors returned home to discover that most of their loved ones had been murdered.
During the Holocaust many women faced new and unexpected situations and dilemmas that required them to make fateful decisions. They tried as much as possible to protect their families, secure food, find work and safeguard their children, even when it came at the unbearable cost of separation.
Jewish children were especially vulnerable to Nazi persecution. With the outbreak of the war, they witnessed the collapse of the family unit, and many were condemned to the suffering of ghetto life—cut off from the world and living under the shadow of terror and violence. Approximately one and a half million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. Few survived.
During the Holocaust, the medical profession was represented in different and contradictory ways: Jewish doctors battled to save lives under difficult and dangerous conditions; Nazi doctors conducted monstrous medical experiments in the service of their ideology; and non-Jewish doctors risked their lives to help Jews and were later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.
In the prewar Jewish world, rabbis, yeshiva heads and Hasidic rebbes served as crucial sources of spiritual and social authority within their communities. During the Holocaust, as anti-Jewish persecution escalated and extermination policies were implemented, these leaders faced a brutal reality that sought to uproot not only lives, but also tradition, identity and hope.
For generations, Jewish holidays and life-cycle events were moments of joy, tradition and belonging. During the Holocaust, alongside the struggle for physical survival and under conditions of extreme hardship, Jews found ways to mark the holidays and life-cycle events, in an expression of spiritual resistance, preservation of identity and hope for a better future.
On the eve of the Holocaust, a rich, diverse and vibrant world of Jewish religious life flourished across Europe. The Holocaust brought near-total destruction to this world. Amid deportation, starvation and constant fear, observant Jews made extraordinary efforts to preserve religious life. In the aftermath of the war, within displaced persons camps and in reemerging Jewish communities, many survivors sought to restore religious and communal life.
The Holocaust was the darkest period in Jewish history. Yet amidst the destruction, hunger, round-ups and deportations, Jews continued—both openly and clandestinely—to cling to learning, creativity and culture.
At the end of World War II, most Holocaust survivors chose to focus on rebuilding their lives. Many of them immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine), which at the time was under British rule and became the State of Israel in 1948. For these survivors, it represented a national and personal homeland.