Established in the spa town of Vichy, the government and area became known as Vichy France. In the summer of , approximately , Jews were living in France. More than half this Jewish population were not French citizens, but refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in other countries. Theoretically, the Vichy Government was independently governed. However, in reality, the Vichy Regime was subject to a large amount of pressure from the Nazis to implement Nazi policies, and often collaborated with them to achieve this.
Laval pushed the Vichy Regime to fully collaborate with the Nazis. From this point onwards, all Jews were targeted, irrespective of their citizenship. Almost immediately after the German invasion, Jews living in both the occupied zone and in Vichy France were subjected to antisemitic measures.
In the occupied zone of France, Jews were treated similarly to those in Poland, and faced immediate persecution by the occupying Nazi forces.
Many were dismissed from their jobs and their freedom of movement was restricted. Throughout the summer of , the Nazis started to arrest Jews for deportation to the east. Following this, they restricted the movements of the remaining Jewish community for future arrests. These arrests were typically carried out by French police.
In October , a decree was passed defining who was a Jew and limiting their involvement in French society.
From onwards, French Jews started to be deported from the Vichy zone. Of these, 70, were sent to Auschwitz. This map of Westerbork, a transit camp the north of the Netherlands was drawn by Ruth Wiener.
To escape antisemitism in Germany, the Wiener family had moved to Amsterdam in Ruth was incarcerated in Westerbork in and later Bergen-Belsen with her mother and two sisters. This is an extract from a report by Bene Otto, the German Foreign Office Representative in Holland on the progress of Jewish deportations from the country. Of these, 72, have been deported to work in the east.
Another 10, Jews have left the country in other ways deportations to Reich German concentration camps, internment camp, relocation to Theresienstadt, emigration, flight from the country. This report was made by Miss E De. Boer, explaining some aspects of the persecution that Jews faced following the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland. This is a banknote from Westerbork Concentration Camp, issued on the 15 February and worth 10 cents.
As normal currency was banned and confiscated in the camp, these vouchers were distributed as an incentive for inmates to complete work. This is a part of a ration card from the Netherlands during the Second World War, entitling the holder to twenty rations of meat. Food in the Netherlands was rationed throughout the Nazi occupation. Within four days, after witnessing the bombing of Rotterdam and the threat of the same in Amsterdam, the Dutch army surrendered.
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands fled to Great Britain, where she established a government-in-exile. Hitler ordered the creation of a German civil administration in the Netherlands under the command of the SS.
After Hitler came to power in , many German Jews began to emigrate to the Netherlands. The Netherlands had remained a neutral power during the First World War, and so many German Jews believed that they would be safe from persecution there.
The Netherlands was home to , Jews, with approximately 75, Jews living in the capital, Amsterdam. Between September and November , Jewish newspapers were closed down, Jewish civil servants were sacked and the assets of all Jewish businesses were registered. Following this, Jewish students were also expelled from schools and universities.
In January , all Jews living within the Netherlands were ordered to register themselves with the SS. A total of , persons registered, including 19, born of mixed marriages. The total also included approximately 25, Jewish refugees from Germany. In the second half of , the Joodse Raad was forced to provide lists of Jews to work in forced labour camps for the German war effort.
In January , persecution escalated as the Nazis ordered the concentration of Jews in Amsterdam. In July , the Germans began transporting Jews who had gathered in Amsterdam to Westerbork, a camp in the north-east of the Netherlands. Westerbork was a transit camp , and Jews were then transported again to extermination camps in the east. The Dutch police actively collaborated and assisted the German authorities in the rounding up of Jews on the streets or in their homes.
Dutch railway workers also administered and operated the trains in which Jews were deported to and from Westerbork. The last train left Westerbork for Auschwitz-Birkenau on 3 September , by which time , Jews had been deported. Of this number, only 5, people survived. The Nazis soon realised that their antisemitic actions would not be able to be easily implemented without resistance from the population of the Netherlands.
In response to this fight, the Germans arrested young people and transported them to Buchenwald. Many of the Dutch population were outraged at this open show of brutality. In response, many Dutch workers went on strike on the 25 February The strike was violently suppressed by the Nazis, forcing the Dutch population back to work. Some of the Dutch population also actively involved themselves more covertly by hiding some Jews from the Nazis. In total, 25,, Jews managed to go into hiding assisted by the Dutch underground.
Of this number, two-thirds managed to survive. Dear Brother! I wish you luck and a flourishing future. Your faithful sister. This drawing also features in the notebook made by Sonja Jaslowitz for her brother Harry. The drawing shows Sonja and Harry saying goodbye at the station as Harry departs for England. Sonja and her parents went through several ghettos and concentration camps in Transnistria, and survived. Tragically, shortly after liberation her father contracted Tuberculosis and died.
Sonja was killed shortly after by a British bomb on Bucharest. She was seventeen. Their mother, Lotte, travelled to England where she was reunited with Harry. This report is from the Einszatgruppen , killing squads which followed behind the German Army. This report details the collaboration and help offered by the Romanian police.
Romania was not occupied but allied with Nazi Germany from onwards, collaborating with them in policy and in the war. Antonescu also brought members of the Iron Guard into government, a far-right, and highly antisemitic political party. Romania actively assisted the Nazis in the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Romanian army and police forces collaborated with the Nazis helping to plan and carry out the murders of thousands of Jews. They also acted independently to carry out several barbaric executions and pogroms in annexed or occupied territories.
The new government signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that formally acknowledged that Romania was no longer allied with Germany. The Iron Guard, the political party brought into government by Antonescu, initially led the physical attacks on Jews in Romania. Jews were beaten up in the streets, and often killed as a result of random attacks on their homes and businesses. The Antonescu government also escalated prior antisemitic laws implemented by previous governments to restrict every area of Jewish life.
Jews were banned from owning any type of rural property. Jewish businesses were nationalised. Jews were excluded from almost every profession of work, and all areas of education both as teachers and students.
From the 27 July , Jews were not allowed to travel. More camps soon followed, such as Bogdanovka , where over 40, Jews perished at the hands of the Romanian authorities. This is a collection of antisemitic and nationalist stickers and notices that were collected by George Burger, a Hungarian Jew, prior to the Second World War. The collection helps to evidence the popularity of these ideas in Hungary at that time. This account is by Mitzi Klamer, one of the few Hungarian Jewish women who managed to escape Budapest with fake papers and survive the war with her family by living in the countryside.
On June 22, , German forces suddenly invaded the Soviet Union. But Germany proved unable to defeat the Soviet Union, which together with Great Britain and the United States turned the tide of battle and ultimately defeated Germany in May We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
View the list of all donors. Trending keywords:. Troops needed a constant supply of new tanks, guns, airplanes, ships, bombs, and other manufactured goods. It was only a matter of time before the gap in economic output provided a decisive advantage on the battlefield. They dismembered the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and shrank the borders of Germany, creating several new countries in Central Europe.
When Hitler began forcefully annexing territory to his east in , it provoked a political crisis and, a year later, the start of World War II. But Japan and China had already been at war for several years at that point. China was politically chaotic in the early s, and Japan saw opportunities for territorial expansion.
Japan established a puppet state called Manchukuo in Manchuria in and dispatched troops to the area. Tensions escalated into full-scale war by This map shows the situation in ; the areas in pink were under Japanese control. Japan never gained full control of China, but neither could Chinese forces under Chiang Kai-shek expel the Japanese from Chinese territory without help from the United States.
Next, he set his sights on the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with large German-speaking populations. This map shows the fraction of German speakers in each of the judicial districts in the modern-day Czech Republic which was then the western half of Czechoslovakia in the s.
As you can see, areas near the borders with Germany to the Northwest and Austria to the Southwest were predominantly German-speaking. Hitler claimed that these regions should be part of Germany, and his threats to take them by force sparked a political crisis.
Chamberlain agreed to let Hitler annex these portions of Czechoslovakia in exchange for a promise from Hitler not to seek further territorial gains. People were used to thinking of Nazis and Communists as occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, so the world was stunned in August when Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made a non-aggression pact.
In contrast, Stalin merely made plans to invade Poland from the other direction. By the end of , the Soviet Union had not only annexed part of Poland, but the nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as well. Finland fought the Soviets to a standstill, losing about 10 percent of their territory but maintaining their sovereignty.
The trench warfare of World War I convinced the French that a strong defense would be crucial to stopping a future German invasion. So France constructed a series of fortifications known as the Maginot Line the heavy blue line in the lower-right of the map here that stretched along the common border between France and Germany.
Hitler realized that a frontal assault on the Line would be counterproductive. The Germans soon reached the portion of the French border not protected by the Maginot Line. The pink region in this map shows German gains between May 10 and May 16, But the Maginot Line still played an important role in the defense of France. It forced early fighting to occur on Belgian rather than French soil, giving the French army time to mobilize before German troops arrived.
French and British troops were forced to retreat rapidly as German troops advanced. By May 21, German troops had encircled the British forces, effectively trapping them with their backs to the sea.
As the Germans closed in from three sides gaining the territory highlighted in pink here , the British troops were ordered to evacuate, which they did between May 27 and June 4. In all, , British and French troops escaped. It saved hundreds of thousands of British troops who would go on to fight the Nazis later in the war.
Germany knocked France out of the war by the end of June , leaving the United Kingdom to face the Nazis alone.
But first, Germany needed to gain control of the skies over Britain. The British were determined to prevent that. Between July and October, they lost dramatically more airplanes than the British. As the British advantage in the air grew, Hitler was forced to shelve his invasion plans. Thanks to the Bomb Sight project , you can see an interactive map of bombs dropped on London between October 7, , and June 6, These attacks took a heavy toll, with as many as 43, British civilians killed and , injured.
And those Londoners not directly touched by tragedy were profoundly affected by having to spend many long, uncomfortable nights in bomb shelters. Hitler hoped that attacking civilian populations could break the spirit of the British people, but he underestimated his foes. Brits emerged from months of bombings as determined as ever. The British and Americans bombers would subject German cities to even more intensive bombings later in the war. A three-day bombing campaign against Dresden in February took more than 20, German lives.
Instead, France signed an armistice that preserved a degree of French sovereignty in the southern parts of France that had not yet been overrun by German troops. What sovereignty the Vichy government had was ended in November , when the Nazis occupied the rest of France. While the Vichy government maintained nominal control after , it was a puppet regime for the remainder of the war. The degree to which the Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis — including participation in the persecution of Jews — has been a source of controversy and recrimination in French society ever since.
In , Hitler had signed a pact vowing not to attack the Soviet Union. But in June Hitler broke his promise and invaded his eastern neighbor. In the first few months, the campaign was stunningly successful.
The Nazis were able to drive hundreds of miles east and reach the outskirts of Moscow by October. But then Stalin was saved by the bitterly cold winter. The Soviets had more experience operating in cold weather and were better prepared than the Nazis.
German equipment was not designed for below-zero temperatures, German soldiers were under-dressed, and they lacked essentials such as antifreeze. Germany never took Moscow, and that failure proved to be a crucial turning point in the war. Petersburg , which is located at a strategic location on the Gulf of Finland.
When the Germans reached Leningrad in September , they decided to simply encircle the city and starve its inhabitants into submission. They received some assistance from the nearby Finns, who took territory north of Leningrad. Hundreds of thousands of Leningrad residents died in the winter of The worst month of the famine, February , had days when more than 20, people died. The city remained under siege for more than two years before the Red Army finally drove the Nazis out of the area.
As war raged in Europe and Asia, Americans remained ambivalent about the conflict. This map shows which ships were in the harbor that morning and how much damage the Japanese attack did. Japan regarded US entry into the war as inevitable America had already imposed trade restrictions over Japanese attacks in China , and they hoped that a surprise attack would destroy enough of the American Navy to ensure Japanese dominance of the sea.
This proved to be a miscalculation. For one thing, the most powerful ships in the American fleet, its aircraft carriers, were not in the area on that fateful day. It is illustrated by this map prepared by Douglas MacArthur, one of the top American commanders in the Pacific.
Solid lines show actual Japanese attacks, dotted lines show attacks the Americans feared could come next. By the summer of , the Japanese had conquered a broad swath of Southeast Asia, shattering the aura of European and American invincibility that had allowed Western nations to dominate the region for so long. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, a US colony at the time, the American and Filipino troops stationed there were outgunned, and they soon got cornered on the Bataan Peninsula.
They surrendered after a 3-month siege. The victorious Japanese took around 75, prisoners, including around 10, American troops. The prisoners were then forced to march 65 miles up the peninsula to San Fernando, where they boarded railcars bound for a prisoner-of-war camp further north. Japanese troops beat the prisoners, denied them food and water, and coldly executed stragglers.
Precise casualty counts are disputed, but it is believed that the march cost hundreds of American lives along with several thousand Filipinos. The Bataan Death March, as it became known to Americans, was hardly the worst atrocity of the war — the Japanese atrocities in Nanking killed many more non-combatants, for example. But Bataan was one of the biggest atrocities to take American lives, and so became widely known in the United States.
A Japanese general who oversaw the Philippines campaign was tried for war crimes and executed in After a campaign that tried and failed to take the northerly cities of Moscow and Leningrad, Hitler turned his attention to the south in
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