On April 27, 1940, Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp at the site. Construction began in May 1940 and the officially reported date of the camp’s opening was May 20, 1940. The first prisoners were Germans and Poles, sent from Sachsenhausen and Tarnow. By March 1941, prisoner ranks had swelled to 11,000. Primarily a concentration camp serving penal functions, Auschwitz I included a crematorium and, in late summer 1941, the camp briefly operated an experimental gas chamber. From 1940 to 1942, prisoners were primarily Polish political, civic, and spiritual leaders, the intelligentsia, and members of the resistance. Beginning in 1942, some of the Jews deported to Auschwitz were admitted to this main camp. Auschwitz I was also a testing ground for SS physicians carrying out inhumane and pseudoscientific medical experiments in the camp “hospital” (Block 10). Near the hospital was the Death Wall (a.k.a. “Black Wall”) where thousands of prisoners were shot. Auschwitz I expanded rapidly and by late 1941 held 18,000 prisoners; by 1943 it held approximately 30,000 inmates. The evacuation from the camp started on January 18, 1945. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated 1,200 prisoners at Auschwitz I.

The site of the camp was near the Polish village of Brzezinka which was emptied of its Polish population for the project. Overcrowding in Auschwitz I, caused by the arrival of Soviet prisoners of war in late 1941, forced the acceleration of the camp’s construction. The first sections of Auschwitz II-Birkenau were completed in 1942. When construction was complete, the camp had nine sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences. Originally intended as a camp for 100,000 Soviet POWs, Auschwitz II-Birkenau’s main function became the murder of European Jews. The insecticide Zyklon B was used in the camp’s gas chambers. The first provisional gas chambers were judged inadequate for the scale of gassing planned. Four large gas chamber and crematoria facilities became operational between March and June 1943. When all four were operational, Auschwitz II-Birkenau possessed an unsurpassed capacity for mass murder and body disposal. Gassing operations continued until November 1944. The pace of deportations increased in the spring of 1944 after the German occupation of Hungary. The Hungarian Jewish community was by then the largest remaining Jewish community in German-controlled Europe. Between April and November 1944 Auschwitz received more Jewish deportees than it had in the previous two years. During the initial selection, newly arrived prisoners were declared fit or unfit for forced labor by SS physicians or other camp officials. Most were sent immediately to the gas chambers. On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz camp complex was liberated by Soviet forces; at Auschwitz II-Birkenau 5,800 prisoners remained alive. During the course of its existence, prisoners in the camp represented many categories including political prisoners, Poles, criminals, Jews, Soviet POWs, and Sinti-Roma. It is estimated that between 1.1 and 1.6 million predominantly Jewish men, women, and children were murdered at Auschwitz, nearly all of them in the gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Construction began in late 1941 and the camp opened in 1942. Auschwitz III-Monowitz was a massive slave-labor camp that supplied workers for the large chemical and synthetic-rubber works of IG Farbenindustrie’s Buna Werke. By summer 1944, the prisoner population rose to over 10,000 not including the prisoners of its forty subcamps. Due to conditions in the camp, the average life span of prisoners was three to four months and even less in the subcamps. Over 30,000 prisoners died in Auschwitz III-Monowitz during its existence. The evacuation of Auschwitz III-Monowitz and its subsidiary camps began on January 18, 1945, and the prisoners were sent to the camp at Gleiwitz. On January 27, 1945, when Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, there were only 600 remaining prisoners at Auschwitz III-Monowitz.

At the end of 1944 and early in 1945, thousands of Jewish prisoners who were forcibly marched from the east began arriving in the camp. Due to the deteriorating conditions, a typhus epidemic broke out and by mid-April 1945, 35,000 prisoners had perished. On April 15, 1945, the camp was liberated by British forces, who were appalled to find most of the 60,000 inmates in critical condition. During the next five days, 14,000 prisoners died, and in the following weeks, another 14,000 perished.

While not all anti-Israel bias can be considered antisemitism, there are instances when bias against the State of Israel crosses over into antisemitism. This form of antisemitism is sometimes known as the “new antisemitism.”

During the Holocaust, cultural/spiritual resistance was often the only possible way to oppose Nazi tyranny. Examples of cultural resistance included defying Nazi directives by creating schools in the ghettos, maintaining religious customs, writing poems and songs, drawing, painting, or keeping journals and other records of ghetto or camp life. (See also spiritual resistance and armed resistance.)

During the camp’s 12-year existence, the prisoner population included, among others, political opponents, criminals, Sinti and Roma, Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and members of the Catholic clergy. During World War II, Dachau and its system of subcamps was principally responsible for furnishing slave labor to the armament industries. Over 200,000 prisoners were incarcerated at Dachau during its existence. American forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945. They found box cars near the camp filled with bodies in an advanced state of decomposition. These were prisoners who were brought to Dachau from other camps towards the end of the war. In the main camp, American forces liberated approximately 30,000 prisoners.

On May 11, 1960, members of the Israeli Secret Service captured him from Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial. Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem (April-December 1961), convicted, and sentenced to death. Executed on May 31, 1962, Eichmann is the only individual ever sentenced to death by the Israeli penal system.

In May 1941 it became an autonomous concentration camp. The increasing need to use concentration camp prisoners in armaments production led to the expansion of the Gross Rosen camp. It became the center of a vast network of more than 60 subsidiary camps. The main camp held about 10,000 prisoners, and the net of subsidiary camps in Lower Silesia (Germany) and Czechoslovakia held as many as 80,000 inmates. In 1942 the deportation of Jewish prisoners from different parts of Poland to the Gross Rosen camp began. From January 1944 to early February 1945 the camp received more than 100,000 prisoners. Beside Polish Jews, there was an influx of transports from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Italy, the USSR, and other European countries occupied by Germany. In total, 239 transports arrived at Gross Rosen. There were two networks of forced labor camps for Jews in Gross Rosen. The first comprised more than 20 camps that were part of the Organization Schmelt system in Silesia. The second was a series of subsidiary camps for more than 10,000 Hungarian Jews. The evacuation of the main camp began in early February 1945. The Gross Rosen inmates were transferred to Mittelbau-Dora, FlossenbÙrg, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The Soviet Army liberated Gross Rosen on February 13, 1945.

Orchestrated by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth named Herchel Grynzspan, 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed, almost 100 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. German Jews were subsequently held financially responsible for the destruction wrought upon their property during this pogrom. (See also pogrom.)

The Lodz ghetto served as an important industrial center in occupied Poland. One of the first ghettos created, Lodz was also the one that existed the longest. By August 1942, there were about 100 factories in the ghetto. The largest specialized in textile production, notably uniforms for the German army. In 1941 and 1942, about 40,000 Jews were deported to the Lodz ghetto from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Luxembourg, and smaller towns in the Lodz province. This dramatically increased the ghetto population. German authorities established a killing facility nearby and between January and September 1942, deportations to the Chelmno death camp totaled over 116,000 people. Deportations in early September 1942 resulted in the loss of 15,000 people, many of them children and the elderly. By spring of 1943, when most of the other ghettos in Poland and Eastern Europe had been destroyed or were in the process of destruction, the Lodz ghetto still held 70,000 people. In June 1944 massive deportations to Auschwitz and other concentration and death camps ensued. The ghetto was emptied of all but a few of its inhabitants. Soviet forces liberated Lodz on January 19, 1945.

One of the first Nuremberg Laws declared that only Aryans could be citizens of the Reich. This stripped Jews of their political rights, forbade sexual relations between “Aryans” and Jews and did not allow Jews to display the German/Nazi flag or national colors. Thirteen additional decrees were added to the Nuremberg Laws over the next eight years; these included the first official definition of who was to be considered a Jew and who an Aryan.

Jewish partisans played a prominent role in parts of the Soviet Union where the geographical conditions permitted such warfare. In southern European counties such as Yugoslavia and Greece, Jews joined general partisan units as they did in Slovakia. In western European countries, such as Belgium and France, resistance was characterized mainly by underground movements, where Jews played a significant role.

The camp’s personnel consisted of members of the German SS, Ukrainian guards, some Soviet POWs, and a number of Volksdeutsche. Sobibor’s gas chambers were constructed in mid-April 1942, and used until the end of September 1943. Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Soviet Union were killed in the Sobibor camp. A small number of Jews were transferred from Sobibor to forced labor camps in the area. On October 14, 1943, the camp’s surviving inmates rebelled and approximately 300 prisoners from the main camp compound managed to escape (of these only about 50 to 70 survived until May 1945). The Sobibor camp was completely dismantled by the end of 1943. In mid-1944 the Soviet army and the Polish People’s Army liberated the area. Roughly 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor throughout its existence as a death camp.

The first transports arrived from the Warsaw ghetto in July 1942. Between July 23 and September 21, 1942, 254,000 Jews from Warsaw and 112,000 from other places in the Warsaw district were murdered at Treblinka II. From mid-November 1942 until January 1943, transports to Treblinka II came primarily from Bialystok. Some transports of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were sent to Treblinka II in the second half of January 1943. It is estimated that around 900,000 Jews were murdered in Treblinka between July 1942 and March 1943. In March 1943, an operation was launched to burn the bodies of the victims in order to obliterate traces of the killing. An uprising in the camp took place on August 2, 1943. About 850 inmates were at the camp during the uprising. A number of prisoners managed to escape, but only about 150-200 evaded capture but many of them did not survive the war. It is estimated that around 70 prisoners from Treblinka were alive at the end of World War II. The last transports to Treblinka II came from the Bialystok ghetto on August 18 and 19, 1943. In November 1943 about thirty Jewish prisoners remained in Treblinka II. They were all shot before the German and Ukrainian staff left the site of the dismantled camp.

A second wave of deportations, meant to clear the ghetto, began January 18, 1943 but was suspended after four days due to armed resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, in response to renewed efforts to deport the remaining Jews and was led by the commander of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Z.O.B.), Mordecai Anielewicz. The Germans declared the ghetto liquidated on May 16, 1943, although fighting continued after that date and some Jews remained in bunkers within the razed ghetto area until at least January 1944.

On April 27, 1940, Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp at the site. Construction began in May 1940 and the officially reported date of the camp’s opening was May 20, 1940. The first prisoners were Germans and Poles, sent from Sachsenhausen and Tarnow. By March 1941, prisoner ranks had swelled to 11,000. Primarily a concentration camp serving penal functions, Auschwitz I included a crematorium and, in late summer 1941, the camp briefly operated an experimental gas chamber. From 1940 to 1942, prisoners were primarily Polish political, civic, and spiritual leaders, the intelligentsia, and members of the resistance. Beginning in 1942, some of the Jews deported to Auschwitz were admitted to this main camp. Auschwitz I was also a testing ground for SS physicians carrying out inhumane and pseudoscientific medical experiments in the camp “hospital” (Block 10). Near the hospital was the Death Wall (a.k.a. “Black Wall”) where thousands of prisoners were shot. Auschwitz I expanded rapidly and by late 1941 held 18,000 prisoners; by 1943 it held approximately 30,000 inmates. The evacuation from the camp started on January 18, 1945. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated 1,200 prisoners at Auschwitz I.

The site of the camp was near the Polish village of Brzezinka which was emptied of its Polish population for the project. Overcrowding in Auschwitz I, caused by the arrival of Soviet prisoners of war in late 1941, forced the acceleration of the camp’s construction. The first sections of Auschwitz II-Birkenau were completed in 1942. When construction was complete, the camp had nine sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences. Originally intended as a camp for 100,000 Soviet POWs, Auschwitz II-Birkenau’s main function became the murder of European Jews. The insecticide Zyklon B was used in the camp’s gas chambers. The first provisional gas chambers were judged inadequate for the scale of gassing planned. Four large gas chamber and crematoria facilities became operational between March and June 1943. When all four were operational, Auschwitz II-Birkenau possessed an unsurpassed capacity for mass murder and body disposal. Gassing operations continued until November 1944. The pace of deportations increased in the spring of 1944 after the German occupation of Hungary. The Hungarian Jewish community was by then the largest remaining Jewish community in German-controlled Europe. Between April and November 1944 Auschwitz received more Jewish deportees than it had in the previous two years. During the initial selection, newly arrived prisoners were declared fit or unfit for forced labor by SS physicians or other camp officials. Most were sent immediately to the gas chambers. On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz camp complex was liberated by Soviet forces; at Auschwitz II-Birkenau 5,800 prisoners remained alive. During the course of its existence, prisoners in the camp represented many categories including political prisoners, Poles, criminals, Jews, Soviet POWs, and Sinti-Roma. It is estimated that between 1.1 and 1.6 million predominantly Jewish men, women, and children were murdered at Auschwitz, nearly all of them in the gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Construction began in late 1941 and the camp opened in 1942. Auschwitz III-Monowitz was a massive slave-labor camp that supplied workers for the large chemical and synthetic-rubber works of IG Farbenindustrie’s Buna Werke. By summer 1944, the prisoner population rose to over 10,000 not including the prisoners of its forty subcamps. Due to conditions in the camp, the average life span of prisoners was three to four months and even less in the subcamps. Over 30,000 prisoners died in Auschwitz III-Monowitz during its existence. The evacuation of Auschwitz III-Monowitz and its subsidiary camps began on January 18, 1945, and the prisoners were sent to the camp at Gleiwitz. On January 27, 1945, when Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, there were only 600 remaining prisoners at Auschwitz III-Monowitz.

At the end of 1944 and early in 1945, thousands of Jewish prisoners who were forcibly marched from the east began arriving in the camp. Due to the deteriorating conditions, a typhus epidemic broke out and by mid-April 1945, 35,000 prisoners had perished. On April 15, 1945, the camp was liberated by British forces, who were appalled to find most of the 60,000 inmates in critical condition. During the next five days, 14,000 prisoners died, and in the following weeks, another 14,000 perished.

While not all anti-Israel bias can be considered antisemitism, there are instances when bias against the State of Israel crosses over into antisemitism. This form of antisemitism is sometimes known as the “new antisemitism.”

During the Holocaust, cultural/spiritual resistance was often the only possible way to oppose Nazi tyranny. Examples of cultural resistance included defying Nazi directives by creating schools in the ghettos, maintaining religious customs, writing poems and songs, drawing, painting, or keeping journals and other records of ghetto or camp life. (See also spiritual resistance and armed resistance.)

During the camp’s 12-year existence, the prisoner population included, among others, political opponents, criminals, Sinti and Roma, Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and members of the Catholic clergy. During World War II, Dachau and its system of subcamps was principally responsible for furnishing slave labor to the armament industries. Over 200,000 prisoners were incarcerated at Dachau during its existence. American forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945. They found box cars near the camp filled with bodies in an advanced state of decomposition. These were prisoners who were brought to Dachau from other camps towards the end of the war. In the main camp, American forces liberated approximately 30,000 prisoners.

On May 11, 1960, members of the Israeli Secret Service captured him from Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial. Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem (April-December 1961), convicted, and sentenced to death. Executed on May 31, 1962, Eichmann is the only individual ever sentenced to death by the Israeli penal system.

In May 1941 it became an autonomous concentration camp. The increasing need to use concentration camp prisoners in armaments production led to the expansion of the Gross Rosen camp. It became the center of a vast network of more than 60 subsidiary camps. The main camp held about 10,000 prisoners, and the net of subsidiary camps in Lower Silesia (Germany) and Czechoslovakia held as many as 80,000 inmates. In 1942 the deportation of Jewish prisoners from different parts of Poland to the Gross Rosen camp began. From January 1944 to early February 1945 the camp received more than 100,000 prisoners. Beside Polish Jews, there was an influx of transports from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Italy, the USSR, and other European countries occupied by Germany. In total, 239 transports arrived at Gross Rosen. There were two networks of forced labor camps for Jews in Gross Rosen. The first comprised more than 20 camps that were part of the Organization Schmelt system in Silesia. The second was a series of subsidiary camps for more than 10,000 Hungarian Jews. The evacuation of the main camp began in early February 1945. The Gross Rosen inmates were transferred to Mittelbau-Dora, FlossenbÙrg, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The Soviet Army liberated Gross Rosen on February 13, 1945.

Orchestrated by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth named Herchel Grynzspan, 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed, almost 100 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. German Jews were subsequently held financially responsible for the destruction wrought upon their property during this pogrom. (See also pogrom.)

The Lodz ghetto served as an important industrial center in occupied Poland. One of the first ghettos created, Lodz was also the one that existed the longest. By August 1942, there were about 100 factories in the ghetto. The largest specialized in textile production, notably uniforms for the German army. In 1941 and 1942, about 40,000 Jews were deported to the Lodz ghetto from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Luxembourg, and smaller towns in the Lodz province. This dramatically increased the ghetto population. German authorities established a killing facility nearby and between January and September 1942, deportations to the Chelmno death camp totaled over 116,000 people. Deportations in early September 1942 resulted in the loss of 15,000 people, many of them children and the elderly. By spring of 1943, when most of the other ghettos in Poland and Eastern Europe had been destroyed or were in the process of destruction, the Lodz ghetto still held 70,000 people. In June 1944 massive deportations to Auschwitz and other concentration and death camps ensued. The ghetto was emptied of all but a few of its inhabitants. Soviet forces liberated Lodz on January 19, 1945.

One of the first Nuremberg Laws declared that only Aryans could be citizens of the Reich. This stripped Jews of their political rights, forbade sexual relations between “Aryans” and Jews and did not allow Jews to display the German/Nazi flag or national colors. Thirteen additional decrees were added to the Nuremberg Laws over the next eight years; these included the first official definition of who was to be considered a Jew and who an Aryan.

Jewish partisans played a prominent role in parts of the Soviet Union where the geographical conditions permitted such warfare. In southern European counties such as Yugoslavia and Greece, Jews joined general partisan units as they did in Slovakia. In western European countries, such as Belgium and France, resistance was characterized mainly by underground movements, where Jews played a significant role.

The camp’s personnel consisted of members of the German SS, Ukrainian guards, some Soviet POWs, and a number of Volksdeutsche. Sobibor’s gas chambers were constructed in mid-April 1942, and used until the end of September 1943. Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Soviet Union were killed in the Sobibor camp. A small number of Jews were transferred from Sobibor to forced labor camps in the area. On October 14, 1943, the camp’s surviving inmates rebelled and approximately 300 prisoners from the main camp compound managed to escape (of these only about 50 to 70 survived until May 1945). The Sobibor camp was completely dismantled by the end of 1943. In mid-1944 the Soviet army and the Polish People’s Army liberated the area. Roughly 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor throughout its existence as a death camp.

The first transports arrived from the Warsaw ghetto in July 1942. Between July 23 and September 21, 1942, 254,000 Jews from Warsaw and 112,000 from other places in the Warsaw district were murdered at Treblinka II. From mid-November 1942 until January 1943, transports to Treblinka II came primarily from Bialystok. Some transports of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were sent to Treblinka II in the second half of January 1943. It is estimated that around 900,000 Jews were murdered in Treblinka between July 1942 and March 1943. In March 1943, an operation was launched to burn the bodies of the victims in order to obliterate traces of the killing. An uprising in the camp took place on August 2, 1943. About 850 inmates were at the camp during the uprising. A number of prisoners managed to escape, but only about 150-200 evaded capture but many of them did not survive the war. It is estimated that around 70 prisoners from Treblinka were alive at the end of World War II. The last transports to Treblinka II came from the Bialystok ghetto on August 18 and 19, 1943. In November 1943 about thirty Jewish prisoners remained in Treblinka II. They were all shot before the German and Ukrainian staff left the site of the dismantled camp.

A second wave of deportations, meant to clear the ghetto, began January 18, 1943 but was suspended after four days due to armed resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, in response to renewed efforts to deport the remaining Jews and was led by the commander of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Z.O.B.), Mordecai Anielewicz. The Germans declared the ghetto liquidated on May 16, 1943, although fighting continued after that date and some Jews remained in bunkers within the razed ghetto area until at least January 1944.