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Interesting Questions, Facts and Information
- There are a total of 85 general entries. We are selecting 30 for display.
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 Interesting Questions, Facts, and Information
 Holocaust
Dachau. Dachau was established on March 22, 1933. It was located near Munich, Germany.
56. Hitler was born in the year 1889. He committed suicide on April 30, 1945.
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau was established in 1940. It was both a death and a slave labor camp.
Ravensbrueck. Ravensbrueck was built in 1939 and was located north of Berlin.
May 5, 1945. Mauthausen was a camp for men. It was located in Upper Austria. The S.S. thought that it was one of the harshest camps. Many people died, by being thrown off cliffs; others died of exhaustion.
Yes. Besides Jews, the Nazis killed political opponents, homosexuals, the handicapped, the mentally ill, Gypsies, people who helped these groups and Jehovah's Witnesses, or anyone else that did not fit into the 'Aryan Race' or into the Nazi scheme of things.
October 1940. In 1940, the Jews were sent to live in the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis. They lived in terrible conditions. Many of the Jews that lived there were sent to Treblinka in 1942.
Because the Olympics were held in Berlin. They took down these signs for the Olympics, so the rest of the world would not see how Jews were being treated. Then the Nazis put them back up after the Olympics were over.
Westerbork. Anne Frank, her family, and the rest of the people that were in the secret annex, were held at Westerbork. They were held there between August 8, 1944 to September 3, 1944, before being taken to other concentration camps.
Josef Mengele. After the war Mengele escaped to Brazil, where he lived under another name until he died in 1979. In 1985 the body of one Wolfgang Gerhart was identified as Mengele.
| The 'Reich Citizenship Law', or, 'The Law for the Protection of German Blood' reclassified Jews as second-class citizens. What name are these generally known by? | The Holocaust
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The Nuremberg Laws. This law established various categories of 'Jewishness': full Jews, half Jews and quarter Jews. It also strictly forbade marriage or sexual acts of any kind between Jews and non-Jews.
| What is the 'Kristallnacht' usually called in English? | The Holocaust
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'Night of the Broken Glass'. The 'Kristallnacht', or 'Night of the Broken Glass' occurred on the night of 9-10 November 1938. Jewish shops, businesses, some homes, and every single synagogue in Germany and Austria were smashed up or burned by the SA (Stormtroopers) acting orders from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
1933. The first permanent concentration camp was Dachau, near Munich, which opened March 22nd, 1933. It was to imprison 'Enemies of the Reich' (espeically Communists, Social Democrats and labour leaders).
| Which European country had the largest Jewish population prior to World War II with 3.3 million, amounting to 10 percent of the population as a whole? | The Holocaust
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Poland. The German conquest of Poland in September 1939 left Hitler with about 2 million Jews under his rule - greatly increased when eastern was added with the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Some historians believe that this was a significant factor in the decision to to embark on the Holocaust. Solving the 'Jewish Question' by enforced emigration was no longer feasible.
| In 1939 Reinhard Heydrich decided to concentrate the Polish Jews into small urban areas to make them easier to handle. What name was given (unofficially) to these forced Jewish communities? | The Holocaust
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Ghettos. In 1516, the city fathers of Venice Italy decreed that all of the city's Jews had to live on the island of Geto. Soon all Jewish quarters of cities were known as ghettos.
| What were Jewish people ordered to wear in order to mark them out clearly from the rest of the population? | The Holocaust
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Star of David. The Nazis revived this notorious custom, which was first used in the Middle Ages. It was introduced in different countries at different times, beginning in occupied Poland in November 1939. (Some of the earliest Jewish badges were blue on white).
| How were Jews usually moved to extermination camps (except over very short distances)? | The Holocaust
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In enclosed cattle trucks (box cars). The cattle trucks were hauled by very slow freight trains and the journey from, say Paris to Auschwitz often took 72 hours plus. No food or water were provided and there was only one bucket per 50 people. Not surprisingly, quite a number did not survive the journey.
| For a while in 1940 the Nazi leaders considered shipping the European Jews to this island and dumping them there. Which island was was it? | The Holocaust
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Madagascar. The plan was based on the assumption that Germany would win the war quickly and easily. It was never a realistic plan and was abandoned after a few months.
Ravensbrueck. Ravensbrueck was opened by the Nazis in May 1939. When it was liberated in 1945, over 100,000 women had passed through it. The inmates of Ravensbrueck were the first to be moved to Auschwitz.
Judenrat . The council chairman often had to choose which people were to be transferred from the ghettos to the concentration camps.
Denmark. When the authorities in Denmark found out that their Jews were to be transported, they notified the Danish resistance. They were able to take 7,200 of their 7,800 Jews to neutral Sweden.
| Which was the first concentration camp to be liberated? | The Holocaust
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Majdanek. Majdanek was liberated by the Soviets in July, 1944. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets, too Belsen by the British and Buchenwald by the US.
Chelmno. Jews were first murdered with gas in enclosed vans before the gas chambers were created.
1941. After the "Final Solution" was started, ghettos were emptied and their inhabitants sent to the concentration camps.
Warsaw. The Warsaw Ghetto housed 450,000 Jews in a space that took up less than one square mile.
| What was the name of the German industrialist who saved over twelve hundred Jews from the death camps by employing them in his factory? | The Genocide of the Holocaust
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Schindler . Oskar Schindler was declared a 'Righteous Person' by the Israelis. This was a Jewish honour bestowed on Gentiles, based on Jewish tradition. Oskar died in 1974 in Frankfurt after spending the years since the end of the war travelling around the world.
| A Gestapo squad, led by Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon' planned a dawn raid on a Jewish orphanage on 6 April 1944, taking 44 children and 7 adults away on two trucks. Of the 51 people taken that day, only one adult survived the war. Where was this orphanage? | The Genocide of the Holocaust
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Izieu. Izieu was close to both Lyons and Chambery, falling into Barbie's jurisdiction. The trucks took the children and their carers to Drancy, and from there to Auschwitz, where 42 children and 5 adults were gassed on arrival. Two children and the superintendent of the orphanage were shot.
| The Warsaw Ghetto was by far the largest in Europe during the Nazi occupation years; in 1942 the Germans started to empty the ghetto by sending thousands to death camps. The great majority were sent to which camp? | The Genocide of the Holocaust
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Treblinka. There are so many stories from the Warsaw ghetto that it is difficult to isolate just one, but I will do so. This is a direct quote from the book 'Courage Under Siege: Disease, Starvation and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto’ by Charles G Roland: 'Far worse was the experience of an anonymous Jewish woman who gave birth, in January 1943, while hidden along with several others in an attic. The Nazis were searching for hidden Jews to be either shot on the spot or taken to the Umschlagplatz and hence to Treblinka. The young woman gave birth without uttering a sound: "... every sound, every murmur, even the slightest, caused antipathy and hostility among our companions of misfortune." What of the baby's cries? It died later, it is said, from lack of nourishment.'
Treblinka was, until Auschwitz became an efficient death factory, the most deadly of all the camps. A transport arriving would expect to have a 99% loss though gassing within the first few hours. In 1943 it boasted the largest number of Jewish deaths throughout Europe.
| In the years since the Second World War ended survivors have told their story, or kept quiet and tried to forget what had happened to them. Because of the deprivations the Jews were forced to live and die under, written records from the time itself are rare. However, we are blessed to have one complete diary, written by a young girl in hiding, printed in 55 languages for all to read. Her name, as the world knows, was Anne Frank, and she has become a symbol of the Holocaust. Do you know in which city she hid with her family? | The Genocide of the Holocaust
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Amsterdam. The Frank family lived at Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam, until they were discovered and sent to Auschwitz. From there Anne and her sister went to Bergen-Belsen where it is thought they died from typhus. Bergen-Belsen was not one of the camps where people were systematically gassed and incinerated. Rather, the Germans there preferred to have the inmates starve and die of illnesses such as typhus in the terrible conditions they created.
| One Holocaust survivor who settled in America was challenged by an organisation of neo-Nazis to prove that people were gassed in concentration camps. This was Mel Mermelstein, who proved in an American court of law that the Holocaust did take place, but what was the name of the organisation he was fighting in court? | The Genocide of the Holocaust
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Institute for Historical Review. This story can be seen in the TV movie 'Never Forget', starring Leonard Nimoy. This film shows how the Institute challenged Mel to prove his stories of the Holocaust. On the advice of his lawyer, Mel accepted the challenge, and when the Institute did not respond, he took them to California Superior Court. On October 9, 1981, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas T. Johnson ruled in favour of Mel Mermelstein, saying that: 'This court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944. It is not reasonably subject to dispute. And it is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of reasonably indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact.'
| In June 1944 Mala Zimetbaum (number 19880) escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau with a male prisoner from Auschwitz, Edward Galinski (number 531). They were found and brought back and simultaneous executions were planned for 15 September 1944, witnessed by the entire camp in each case. Their plan to make an example of them was thwarted however, as Mala did not hang. What happened? | The Genocide of the Holocaust
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she slit her veins with a razor blade. An eye-witness account (Rena Kornreich Gelissen, number 1716) says that the Germans took Mala away saying they were to throw her into the ovens alive, but another account referred to in Rena's book ('Rena's Promise') says that she was taken to the prisoners' infirmary to stop the bleeding so the execution could proceed. What is certain, however, is that she was not hanged, but it is unknown whether she was alive or dead by the time she reached the ovens.
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