“Please don’t forget us... If you survive, tell the world what happened.”
- Nesse Godin, survivor of Stutthof concentration camp, Germany and a death march
Oral history with Nesse Godin, Washington, D.C. 14 December 1995. In Beth B. Cohen,?Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America.?New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007, p. 157. Courtesy of Beth B. Cohen.
The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme
The United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously to establish the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme in 2005 to “mobilize civil society for Holocaust remembrance and education, in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide”. The Outreach Programme is an expression of the United Nations’ commitment to protect the right of all people to live with dignity and in peace.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/7 in 2005 designated 27 January as the annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and established the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme. Resolutions adopted in 2007 and in 2022 reiterated the United Nations’ commitment to counter antisemitism and Holocaust distortion and denial.
The Global Impact of the Holocaust
A warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism, and prejudice." - Dawid Sierakowiak, (1924–1943), entry dated 18 March 1942. United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/76/250 on Holocaust Denial
The United Nations was established in response to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The Holocaust has had a profound impact on International Human Rights Law, resulting in the United Nations’ adoption of foundational documents in 1948: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents the universal recognition that basic rights and fundamental freedoms are inherent to all human beings, inalienable and equally applicable to everyone, and that every one of us is born free and equal in dignity and rights. Whatever our nationality, place of residence, gender, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status, the international community on 10 December 1948 made a commitment to upholding dignity and justice for all of us.
The World That Was
Coming to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis implemented their racist agenda. Their targets included Jews, people with physical and mental disabilities, Germans of African descent, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, and Slavs. Antisemitic persecution intensified after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, triggering the Second World War, and followed shortly by the invasion of the East of Poland by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Germans isolated Jews in ghettos and deported them for slave labour.
With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators began to murder Jews systematically. To relieve the stress on the killers of the face-to-face murder of women, children and men, the regime established annihilation sites equipped with lethal gas chambers. And it sought to erase Jewish family life, culture, and religious tradition. The Allied Forces defeated Nazi Germany and its allies in 1945.
Only one-third of Jewish men, women and children in Europe survived the Holocaust.
Mother and son, Henrietta and Ivan Rechts. 1939 Former Czechoslovakia. They were subsequently deported to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, where they perished. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #47570. Courtesy of Gabriella Reitler Rosberger, Source Record ID: Collections: 2004.7. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Mother with daughter on swing, Zwickau, Germany, circa 1937. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives # 64847. Courtesy of Shoshana Loeb. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
We had a family life. I had four grandparents. Family … there were a lot of certainties. But the certainties ended when I was fourteen years old. They never came back again, of course.” - Frieda Menco-Brommet (1925–2019). Oral history conducted by Debórah Dwork, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 1986. Debórah Dwork, “Children With A Star” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p.7?
Two Jewish brothers on vacation in Italy, April 1935. On the left is Paul Barber and his child, and on the right Gyorgy Barber with his infant. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #17193. Courtesy of Charles & Herma Ellenboghen Barber. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Jews had lived as a minority in Europe for two thousand years before Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933. Maintaining Jewish and national identities, Jews were diverse. Some were pious, some secular; some were poor, some working class, others middle class.
After the Nazi regime took control, all Jews caught in their web were at risk. By 1945, six million – two-thirds of Europe's prewar Jewish population – were annihilated, and the life and culture that had existed for millennia irrevocably ruptured.
The Nazis persecuted Europe’s Roma and Sinti communities, murdering some 500,000 - one-third of Europe’s Roma and Sinti population - by war’s end.
Portrait of two Jewish sisters, Budapest, Hungary, circa 1930–1935. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #45560. Courtesy of Provenance: Gabor Kalman Source Record ID: Collections: 2001.335. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Fubini family poses by a riverbank, Torino, Italy, circa 1930–1939. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #49040. Courtesy of Franco Fubini. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Roma family, Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany, 1936. Despite this photograph having been taken in the garden of the Racial-Hygienic and Heredity Research Centre in the Reich Health Office, Berlin, and the identity and intention of the photographer unknown, the close-knit nature of the family and their affection and joy shine bright. Credit: Bundesarchiv, R 165 Bild-244-59 / Photographer unknown.
Sophie Kimelman poses with her twin cousins holding their dolls, Lvov, Poland, circa 1929–1930. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #65589. Courtesy of Dr. Sophie Kimelman-Rosen. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Children from the Beit Ahavah Children’s Home in class, Berlin, Germany, circa 1922–1930. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #48873. Courtesy of Ayelet Bargur. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Josef Cohn and his grandsons, Leo and Haim, study the Talmud, Hamburg, Germany, circa 1932–1933. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #93800. Courtesy of Noemi Cassutto. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Teenagers at a Purim party, Frankfurt, Germany, circa 1933–1936. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #56413. Courtesy of Walter Wolff. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Elly and Henri Rodrigues (front center) at a birthday party in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1936. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #96361. Courtesy of Carolyn Stewart. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A group of young Greek Jews in front of a tobacco store, Salonika, Greece, circa 1930-1939. Among those pictured are Yehuda and Miriam Beraha (front row, left). Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #4248. Courtesy of Jack Beraha, Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Members of the ice hockey team of the Jewish sport's club, Hagibor. Prague, former Czechoslovakia, circa 1925–1930. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #65440. Courtesy of Andrea Renner. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A Jewish youth band performs in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, 1932. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives # 25106. Courtesy of Gavra Mandil, Source Record ID: Collections: 2002.158. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Members of a French-Hungarian Romani musical band, Lyon, France, circa 1920–1930. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #33341. Courtesy of Rita Prigmore, Source Record ID: Collections: 2004.226.1 Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Greta Stoessler Engel stands next to her horse, Austria, circa 1920–1930. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #42064. Courtesy of Katie Altenberg. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Holocaust (1933-1945)
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, ideologicallydriven persecution and murder of six million Jews across Europe and half a million Roma and Sinti by Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and other racist states. Nazi ideology built upon pre-existing antisemitism and antigypsyism/ anti-Roma prejudice. The Nazi regime dismantled the democratic institutions of government and used state mechanisms to put its racist ideology into practice and to justify its abuses of human rights.
Nazi racism demanded the murder of people with disabilities, the forced sterilization of Germans of African descent, the murder of Soviet prisoners of war, and the enslavement of Slavs. The Nazis persecuted all they deemed as regime opponents including political dissidents, those identified as homosexual and lesbian, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
But in the Nazi imagination, Jews loomed as the primary threat. The Nazi government enacted its racist antisemitic agenda and, after 1941, embarked upon the murder of every Jewish child, woman, and man.
Identification and segregation
Josef Cohn and his grandsons, Leo and Haim, study the Talmud, Hamburg, Germany, circa 1932–1933. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #93800. Courtesy of Noemi Cassutto. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Once in power, the Nazis began the process of social and economic disenfranchisement and segregation of Jews in Germany, thus facilitating the growing abuse.
From 1934 on, signs prohibiting Jews from using public spaces including libraries, swimming pools, theatres, cinemas, and park benches appeared throughout Germany and, after the 1938 Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Germany, in Austria as well.
Once in my lifetime I want to still have a whole loaf of bread. That was my dream.” - – Itka Zygmuntowicz (1926–2020), Survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Death Camp (1940–1945) RG-50.030*0435, Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz, (1926-2020). Oral History Interviews of the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Children from the Beit Ahavah Children’s Home in class, Berlin, Germany, circa 1922–1930. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #48873. Courtesy of Ayelet Bargur. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This exhibit was launched in January 2025