# 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
Joseph Goebbels
Heinrich Müller
Reinhard Heydrich
Adolf Eichmann
Odilo Globocnik
Theodor Eicke
Richard Glücks
Ernst Kaltenbrunner
Rudolf Höss
Christian Wirth
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
Iași
Izieu
Szczuczyn
Jedwabne
Plungė
Radziłów pogrom
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.