Extermination Jews facts
While investigating facts about Extermination Jews, I found out little known, but curios details like:
The Polish government wrote a White Book with proof of the mass extermination of jews in german occupied Poland and gave it to the United Nations on December 10th, 1942.
how many extermination camps were there?
Karl Plagge was a Wehrmacht officer who used his position to try and save 1240 Jews in Lithuania from Nazi extermination. At his trial he did not speak in his own defense because he blamed himself for not doing enough. In 2005 he was awarded "Righteous Among the Nations".
What were extermination camps?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what is the difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. Here are 17 of the best facts about Extermination Jews I managed to collect.
what happened at extermination camps?
-
A lieutenant in the Nazi army, Albert Battel, refused to round up Jews and haul them to the Belzec extermination camp. Instead he brought them to a local military barracks for protection. Battel was later discharged in 1944 and settled in West Germany.
-
Even five years after the end of WWII, surveys showed about 35% of Germans still thought that the extermination Jews and Poles was in the best interests of Germany.
-
Gas chambers were first used by the United States for prisoners, before being adopted by the Nazis to exterminate Jews
-
The Nazis originally sought to rid the German state of Jews and Romani by means of extermination, while black people were to be segregated and eventually exterminated through compulsory sterilization. An estimated 500 children were sterilized under this program, including girls as young as 12.
-
Rudolf Hoess was an SS officer at Auschwitz who testified at Nuremberg that "at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning" and that "the 'final solution' of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe."
-
"porraimos" is the gypsy (Roma) word for holocaust, meaning "devouring." Half a million were exterminated by the Nazis and, apart from the Jews, they were the only people condemned for purely racial reasons.
-
During the last 11 months of its existence the Treblinka Extermination Camp administration recorded the exact number of deportees brought in and the exact amount of goods sent out. The number of Jews were: total, two million, seven hundred and seventy-four thousand died. 2,774,000.
-
Wilhelm II, former emperor of Germany, wrote a hate filled letter to one of his former generals in which he denounced Jews and mentioned they should be exterminated with gas being the best option. The letter was written in 1919 after his forced abdication.
-
The Nazi's initial plan to deal with Jews wasn't to exterminate them, but rather to forcibly relocate European Jews to the island of Madagascar. Known as the "Madagascar Plan", its exact goal was the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years to the island.
-
Giorgio Perlasca an Italian businessman and former fascist who, posed as the Spanish consul-general to Hungary and saved 5,218 Jews from deportation to Nazi extermination camps in eastern Europe
Why were the extermination camps located in poland?
You can easily fact check why was poland the country selected to establish extermination camps by examining the linked well-known sources.
That, during the Holocaust, Romania was responsible for exterminating approximately 300,000 Jews, giving it the sinister distinction of ranking second only to Nazi Germany in terms of the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
The Nazi didn't initially plan to systemically exterminate all Jews. At first they planned to deport all European Jews to Madagascar, but it was abandoned for logistic reasons. They also considered deporting them to Palestine or Siberia. The decision to kill them was only made official in 1942. - source
The first mention of an extermination of 6,000,000 first Jews appeared in the Talmud religious book over 3,000 years ago. This number became a reality during the Jewish holocaust of the 1940's. - source
Adam Czerniaków who committed suicide rather than follow orders to round up Jews for mass extermination. He wrote: "They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. I have nothing to do but to die. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do."
At the Belzec trial, a Nazi extermination camp where ~500,000 Jews were killed, one SS officer was condemned to 4.5 years in jail and all others were acquitted. - source
