The Second World War, in which most European states took part, became a period of brutal genocide of the Jewish people. According to generally known data, the same number of Jews survived the Holocaust as died. In the former USSR alone, more than one and a half million people of this nationality were killed during the war. A worldwide memorial day is dedicated to this tragic phenomenon.
When it passes
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated on January 27th. It was established on November 1, 2005 by resolution No. 60/7 of the UN General Assembly. In 2020, the date is celebrated for the 15th time.
Some countries have their own days of honoring the memory of victims of the Holocaust, associated with specific events:
- Israel - Nisan 27 (Jewish calendar);
- Latvia - July 4;
- Hungary - April 16;
- Romania - October 9.
Who's celebrating
On January 27, people all over the planet remember the martyrs of the Holocaust: they honor the survivors and mourn the dead.
History and traditions of the holiday
The date of International Holocaust Remembrance Day has symbolic significance. It is dedicated to the day of the liberation of prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz by Soviet troops. This event occurred on January 27, 1945.
The word “Holocaust” itself is taken from the ancient Greek language and translated into Russian means “burnt offering, destruction by fire.” In the modern world, it is used in the context of the brutal Nazi policies aimed at exterminating the Jewish people.
Every year there are fewer and fewer participants in terrible events, but memories of them continue to remain in the hearts of many people. This is not just a memorial date, but also an international protest against any manifestations of anti-Semitism and genocide.
Many monuments have been erected around the world and museums have been organized in honor of the memory of more than 6 million Jews who became victims of the Nazis.
On this day, international conferences and world thematic forums are held under the motto “Life for my people.” The main goal of such meetings and related events is to create an appropriate culture for preventing similar events in the future, combating prejudices and fostering tolerance for the traditions and culture of other peoples. Humanity should learn to learn from the past. You need to start, as you know, with yourself.
Every year on January 27th International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated. The corresponding resolution was adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 1, 2005. The initiating countries of the document were Israel, Canada, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, the USA and more than 90 other states.
The Holocaust comes from the ancient Greek holocaustosis - “burnt offering”, “destruction by fire”, “sacrifice”, and nowadays, in scientific literature and journalism, it means the policy of Nazi Germany and its allies and accomplices of the persecution and extermination of six million Jews in 1933-1945 . The term was first used by the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate writer Elie Wiesel as a symbol of the gas chambers and crematoria of the extermination camps.
The date of the memorable day was not chosen by chance - on January 27, 1945, the Soviet army liberated the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. It was not possible to establish the exact number of victims of Auschwitz - according to various estimates, from 1.5 to 4 million people died here.
The resolution of November 1, 2005 of the UN General Assembly calls on Member States to develop educational programs to preserve the memory of the lessons of the Holocaust and prevent future acts of genocide. Thus, the resolution states that the Holocaust led to “the extermination of one third of the Jewish people and countless members of other minorities, will always serve as a warning to all people about the dangers that are fraught with hatred, fanaticism, racism and prejudice,” the UN GA quotes RIA News.
In memory of the six million Jewish victims of Nazism, memorials and museums have been erected in many countries around the world, and since 2005, a series of high-level events called the World Holocaust Forum (International Forum “Live for My People!”) has been held.
The theme of International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018 is “Holocaust Education and Remembrance: Our Shared Responsibility.” In a conversation with a Vestnik Kavkaza correspondent, the head of the press service of the Russian Jewish Congress (REC) Mikhail Savin reported that the main event of the International Holocaust Remembrance Week in Moscow was the large RJC memorial evening and the concert of the “Yellow Stars” project from St. Petersburg. “It was a large memorial event, consisting of an official part, during which representatives of the organizers of the gala evening - the Russian Jewish Congress Charitable Foundation and the state institution Nativ, subordinate to the office of the head of the Israeli government, as well as representatives of the Moscow government and the Center spoke. Holocaust." After the official part there was a concert - fragments from the novel Vasily Grossman“Life and Fate” to the accompaniment of a pianist Polina Osetinskaya and clarinetist Juliana Milkis read by People's Artist of Russia Ksenia Rappoport, a young violinist performed Anna Zilberbord“- said Mikhail Savin.
This year, the organizers of the concert decided to make it a charity event and open to everyone. “It was possible to attend the event in exchange for a donation. All funds raised will be directed to the memorial program of the Russian Jewish Congress “Restore Dignity”, within the framework of which 26 monuments to victims of the Holocaust are planned to be erected in Russia in 2018. Thus, those who came to the concert themselves took part in preserving the memory of the Holocaust, and therefore in preventing it in the future,” concluded the head of the RJC press service.
"Vestnik Kavkaza"
The Holocaust is a long-established term that means the mass extermination of the Jewish population of Europe by the Nazis (translated from Greek, this word means “burnt offering”, another meaning is catastrophe). Between 1933 and 1945, 60 percent of Europe's Jewish population was subjected to systematic persecution. About two million 900 thousand people of Jewish nationality died on the territory of the former Soviet Union.
It is known that almost as many people of Jewish nationality survived the occupation as died. Each of those who managed to escape was helped by someone to take refuge, risking their own lives.
Since 1953, Israel has awarded people who hid Jews during the Holocaust the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations. Today there are about 15 thousand righteous people in the world, including about 3.5 thousand citizens of the former USSR.
On November 1, 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 60/7, which decided that January 27 will be observed annually as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. January 27 was chosen because it was on this day in 1945 that the Soviet army liberated the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland). During the existence of this concentration camp, according to various estimates, from 1.5 to 2.2 million people died there.
“The Holocaust, which resulted in the extermination of one third of the Jews and countless victims of other minorities, will always serve as a warning to all peoples about the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and bias,” the UN General Assembly resolution states. The initiators of the adoption of the document were Israel, Canada, Australia, Russia and the United States, and their co-authors were more than 90 more states.
The UN General Assembly called on Member States to develop educational programs to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust are forever remembered by subsequent generations and help prevent future acts of genocide.
Anti-Jewish policy of Nazi Germany 1933-39
Anti-Semitic ideology formed the basis of the program of the National Socialist Party of Germany (NSDAP), adopted in 1920, and was substantiated in Hitler’s book “My Struggle”. After coming to power in January 1933, Hitler pursued a consistent policy of state anti-Semitism. Its first victim was the Jewish community of Germany, numbering more than 500 thousand people. The “Final Solution” (from German: Endlosung) of the Jewish question in Germany, and later in the Nazi-occupied states, involved several stages. The first of them (1933-39) consisted of forcing Jews to emigrate through legislative measures, as well as propaganda, economic and physical actions against the Jewish population of Germany.
On April 1, 1933, the Nazis organized a nationwide “boycott of Jewish stores and goods.” Ten days later, a Decree was adopted defining the status of “non-Aryan”, which was assigned to Jews. They were expelled from public service, schools and universities, medical institutions, the media, the army and the judiciary. Nazi propaganda, not unsuccessfully, created the image of Jews as an “internal and external enemy” responsible for all the country’s troubles. On May 10, 1933, a mass burning of books written by “non-Aryans” took place in Berlin.
The laws “On Citizens of the Reich” and “Protection of German Honor and German Blood”, adopted in September 1935 at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, as well as amendments to them adopted two months later, legally formalized the deprivation of German Jews of all political and civil rights. Subsequent legislation forced Jewish owners of enterprises and firms to hand them over to the “Aryans.” Men and women with non-Jewish names were required to write “Israel” or “Sarah” (later also the letter “J”, from German Jude Jew) on their passports. After the Anschluss of Austria, a special bureau for the “voluntary emigration of Jews” was created, headed by the head of the “Jewish department” of the Reich Security Office (RSHA) K. Eichmann.
An international conference on the problems of Jewish refugees held on July 5, 1938 in the French city of Evian-les-Bains showed that not a single Western country was ready to accept the Jews of Germany. A symbol of indifference to their fate was the steamship St. Louis with Jewish refugees on board, which was not allowed into the territorial waters of first Cuba and then the United States.
In November 1938, the world was shocked by the events of Kristallnacht, organized by the Gestapo in response to the murder of a German diplomat in Paris, committed after the forced deportation of 15 thousand Jews to Poland.
On the night of November 9–10, all 1,400 synagogues in Germany were burned or destroyed, Jewish homes, shops, and schools were looted. 91 Jews were killed, several thousand were wounded, tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps. An indemnity of 1 billion marks was imposed on the German Jewish community “for the damage caused.” On January 24, 1939, Goering issued an order “On urgent measures to accelerate Jewish emigration from Germany.” In total, on the eve of World War II, over 300 thousand Jews left Germany. A faster pace of emigration was hampered by the high degree of assimilation of German Jews and the impossibility of mass emigration not only to the territory of Palestine, which was under the British mandate and was not interested in Jewish settlers, but also to other states of the world.
The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe
After the capture of Poland, more than 2 million Jews of this country were under the control of the Nazis. On September 21, 1939, an order was issued by the head of the RSHA, R. Heydrich, on the creation of special Jewish quarters (ghettos) in cities near large railway stations. Jews from the surrounding countryside also moved there. The first ghetto was created in Petrokow Tribunalski in October 1939. The largest ghetto in Europe was located in Warsaw (created at the end of 1940). Here, 500 thousand Jews, a third of the city's population, were housed on streets that made up no more than 4.5% of Warsaw's territory.
Lack of food, disease and epidemics, and overwork led to enormous mortality. However, this rate of extermination of Jews did not suit the Nazis. At a conference prepared by Heydrich and Eichmann held on January 20, 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Van Zee, a death sentence was imposed on 11 million Jews from 33 European countries. To destroy them, 6 death camps were created in Poland (in Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec and Auschwitz). The main one (using gas chambers and crematoria) was the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp built near the city of Auschwitz, where over 1 million 100 thousand Jews from 27 countries died.
Jews of all Nazi-occupied countries were subject to registration, they were required to wear armbands or stripes with six-pointed stars, pay indemnities and hand over jewelry. They were deprived of all civil and political rights, imprisoned in ghettos, concentration camps or deported. In death camps and ghettos in Eastern Europe (including the occupied regions of the USSR), 200 thousand German Jews were exterminated; 65 thousand Austria; 80 thousand Czech Republic; 110 thousand Slovakia; 83 thousand France; 65 thousand Belgium; 106 thousand Netherlands; 165 thousand Romania; 60 thousand Yugoslavia; 67 thousand Greece; 350 thousand Hungary. The overwhelming number of civilians in all these countries who died at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices were Jews. The most significant victims (over 2 million people) were suffered by the Jewish community of Poland (in addition, more than 1 million former Polish Jews died in the territories that were transferred to the Soviet Union in the fall of 1939).
Holocaust on the territory of the USSR
The systematic extermination of the Jewish civilian population by the Nazis began (for the first time in Europe) immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union. It was attended by 4 SS Einsatzgruppen “A”, “B”, “C” and “D”, assigned to the corresponding groups of Wehrmacht troops, SS police battalions and Wehrmacht rear units, local collaborators, allies of Nazi Germany. The thesis about the fight against “Jewish Bolshevism,” with the help of which Soviet Jews were identified with the communists as the main enemies of the Reich, became one of the leitmotifs of Nazi propaganda, including in periodicals for residents of the occupied Soviet territories. Any acts of resistance to the occupiers in the first months of the war were declared “Jewish actions,” and the victims of retaliatory terror were predominantly Jews (this was the motivation for the reprisals against the Jews of Kyiv, where several tens of thousands of Jews were killed at Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941, and Odessa).
The Einsatzgruppen exterminated all Jews in the countryside, as well as in cities in the zone of the German military administration (east of the Dnieper). Destruction was often carried out in the populated areas themselves, in front of other residents. Several hundred ghettos were created in the civil administration zone, the largest of which in Minsk, Kaunas and Vilnius existed until mid-1943. They were isolated from the rest of the population by barbed wire, internal self-government was carried out by “Judenrats” (councils of elders), appointed by the Nazis to collect indemnities, labor organization and epidemic prevention, as well as food distribution.
The periodic executions of ghetto prisoners, and then the liquidation of all their inhabitants (with the exception of several thousand specialists transferred to work camps) indicate that the Nazis viewed the ghetto as an intermediate stage in the “final solution” of the Jewish question. Only in the territory of Transnistria, captured by Romanian troops, about 70 thousand ghetto prisoners survived. More than 2 million Jews living on the territory of the USSR on June 22, 1941, died at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices (already in the first days of the war, the Nazis inspired Jewish pogroms by local nationalists in Lithuania and Western Ukraine).
Jewish Resistance
The symbol of the Jewish Resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on April 19, 1943, the first urban uprising in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Nazism and Heroes of the Resistance, celebrated annually in all Jewish communities of the world, is dedicated to its anniversary. The uprising lasted several weeks, almost all of its participants died with weapons in their hands. The uprising and escape of several hundred prisoners from the Sobibor death camp, organized by the Soviet Jewish prisoner of war A. Pechersky, was successful. Underground groups that organized armed resistance, as well as prisoner escapes and supplying partisans with weapons and medicine, existed in the Minsk, Kaunas, Bialystok, and Vilna ghettos. Jewish partisan detachments and groups with a total number of about 30 thousand people. fought in the forests of Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Half a million Soviet Jews fought the Nazis on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.
The history of mankind, perhaps, does not remember a more brutal crime than the Holocaust. This term is translated from Greek as “burnt offering” and became widespread only after the 1950s. The history of the victims of the Holocaust is a terrible catastrophe for European Jewry that began in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and established the absolute dictatorship of the National Socialists. The new government was guided by pseudoscientific racial theories and a thirst for cleansing the German nation of those considered objectionable. The Jews suffered the most crushing blow then, and even children became victims of the Holocaust.
- Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?
- History of dislike for Jews
- What do the experts say?
- Number of victims of the Holocaust
- International Holocaust Remembrance Day
- Holocaust museums
Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?
History of dislike for Jews
To the question of why Jews became victims of the Holocaust, scientists and historians have several well-founded answers, and they all go back centuries.
Historically, Jews lived outside their homeland for many centuries. Living on the territory of other peoples, they preserved their language and religion. In appearance, clothing and traditions, they differed from Europeans. When Christianity arose, Judeophobic ideas about Jews began to form. The Catholic Church accused them of killing Jesus Christ.
In the 5th century, St. Augustine formulated the “correct” Christian attitude towards people of Jewish origin: you cannot kill Jews, but you can and should humiliate them. Thus, religious consciousness perceived the image of a Jew as something negative and unclean. As a result, Jews had to live in separate quarters, and the authorities limited their birth rate and freedom of movement. They were expelled from various states, including Russia. The connection between religious Judeophobia and state phobia was very close.
Video about the history of the victims of the Holocaust:
The concept of "anti-Semitism" first appeared in the 19th century. Anti-Semitic sentiments were especially popular in Germany. Hitler, who came to power, unified them into the Nazi ideology and sentenced the Jews to complete destruction. Nazi ideology assumed that the guilt of Jews lay in the very fact of their birth.
In addition, the list of victims of the Holocaust included all “subhumans” and “inferiors,” which were considered all Slavic peoples, homosexuals, gypsies, and the mentally ill.
The Nazis set themselves the goal of eradicating Jews from the face of the earth as a species, making the Holocaust their official policy.
What do the experts say?
Experts express different opinions about the reasons for such a large-scale and unprecedented destruction of people. It is especially unclear why millions of ordinary German citizens participated in this process.
- Daniel Goldhagen considers the main cause of the Holocaust to be anti-Semitism (national intolerance), which at that time massively captured the German consciousness.
- Leading Holocaust expert Yehuda Bauer has a similar opinion on this matter.
- The German historian and journalist Götz Ali suggested that the Nazis supported the policy of genocide because of the property taken from the victims and appropriated by ordinary Germans.
- According to the German psychologist Erich Fromm, the cause of the Holocaust lies in the malignant destructiveness that is inherent in the entire biological human race.
Number of victims of the Holocaust
The number of victims of the Holocaust is horrific: during World War II, the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews. However, many researchers now argue that in fact there were much more Nazi camps than was commonly believed just a few years ago. Accordingly, the number of victims also increases.
Historians have discovered some 42,000 institutions in which the Nazis isolated, punished, and exterminated both Jewish and other groups considered inferior. They pursued this policy over vast territories - from France to the USSR. But the largest number of repressive institutions were located in Poland and Germany.
So, in 2000, a project was launched, the goal of which was to search for death camps, forced labor camps, medical centers where pregnant women had abortions, prisoner of war camps and brothels whose inmates served the German military under duress. In total, more than 400 scientists took part in the project, taking into account the real facts and memories of Holocaust victims.
After the work, American researchers released new figures indicating how many victims of the Holocaust there actually were: about 20 million people.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated on January 27th. This day was approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005, calling on all member countries to develop and educate programs aimed at ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust are retained in the memory of all future generations. People around the world must remember these terrible events to be able to prevent future acts of genocide. Many countries around the world have created memorials and museums that commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Every year on January 27, mourning ceremonies, memorial events and events are held there.
Such events on this day are also held in the Auschwitz memorial camp - a complex of Nazi concentration and death camps where Slavs and Jews - victims of the Holocaust - died en masse in 1940-1945.
According to many scientists, it is very difficult for the human mind to fully comprehend the genocide that originated in a state rich in spiritual traditions and developed culture. These monstrous events took place in civilized Europe almost before the eyes of the whole world. To ensure that a similar Holocaust will never happen again, people must strive to understand its origins and consequences.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated on January 27. The holiday was approved in 2005 at a special meeting of the UN General Assembly dedicated to the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. The date was based on the day of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, the notorious concentration camp located in Poland during the war.
Sad statistics show that during the period of its operation, Auschwitz killed at least one and a half million innocent people, including women and small children. In many countries, mourning ceremonies are held on January 27. Honoring the memory of innocent victims, citizens lay wreaths and flowers at memorial plaques and monuments.
In Germany, Concentration Camp Remembrance Day has existed since 1969, and in Britain it has been celebrated since 2001. The sad holiday does not allow us to forget about the victims of the Holocaust and provides an opportunity for citizens around the world to honor their memory.
At the end of January there is a mournful date -
We honor the memory of those who should not leave,
We honor the souls of those who have gone straight to heaven
From evil, heartless, cruel people
Holocaust... This is a terrible word,
These are tears from the eyes of millions of children,
These are the screams and rare moans of the dead,
These are hundreds of ruined destinies of people.
Humanism - the Nazis did not know this word,
They were ruled by anger and madness of blood,
They only loved themselves, period,
They exterminated other peoples of the earth.
The candles were lit - a scattering of sad stars
We honor the memory with a minute of silence,
All the victims of the disaster called the Holocaust,
For which we find no justification.
We carry sadness for them in our hearts.
We have not forgotten, no, we have not resigned ourselves.
After a year, we are ready to do everything,
May this never happen again.
Today on this sad day
We will remember all the victims of the Holocaust,
Those who died in concentration camps
Let us remember both children and adults,
They went through hell on earth
And experienced the fear of the sea,
Let's pray that never
This grief did not happen again!
Can't be forgotten, can't be left in the past
The pain and blood that the Holocaust brought,
The torment of the prisoners... They scream heart-rendingly...
The churchyard is filled with tortured people.
Let the peoples of the world remember on this day
About the terrible genocide of Nazi beasts.
And may the holy powers protect our world,
Let your eyes never sparkle with tears.
Today is a sad day
We will remember the dead
To all victims of the Holocaust,
Frozen in hearts forever.
Let's pray quietly
We ask for forgiveness
For each and everyone,
We won't ask their names.
Let us remember the victims of the Holocaust today,
And the pain will squeeze the heart in a vice,
Today is the day of universal sorrow,
Great grief and melancholy.
Let the memory of the event not be erased,
And let the world pay its tribute,
May there always be peace and understanding
They dominate everywhere here.
The cruelty of those crazy years
It's not easy for us to remember.
Let's remember everything today, friends,
We are the unfortunate victims of the Holocaust.
Let the world not forget
Innocent people are suffering.
Let understanding come
Both in our lives and in our consciousness.
Holocaust victims today
We remember, yes, it’s not easy
Overestimate this pain
We are lucky to live in peace
Now we can everywhere
Let it not be known again
Nowhere is there a story like this
Let everyone be happy
Nationality and faith
And let such examples
We won't all meet anywhere,
No, such trouble will not happen!
Today is a tragic day for many.
History has cast its shadow here.
About what happened during the war,
On Memorial Day, we all must remember.
How the Germans, the Nazis, gathered people,
They chose Jews and Poles,
They led them to be shot, to be burned,
Because they lived on their territory.
Reprisals were also carried out against those
Those who were captured or over the hopelessly ill.
And only because they decided to dominate
Make your own in this whole world.
It’s hard for all of us to remember those times
Especially those who have a wife,
Both children and brothers died in those concentration camps.
The relatives of prisoners of war erected a memorial to them in Terezin.
