Surviving the Holocaust: Uprisings and the End of the Third Reich

Extermination Camps

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

By summer 1942, deportations were systematic across those parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis. The convoys which arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau came from Poland, but also from western and southern Europe. Hitler issued an order for all Polish Jews to be killed before December 1942.

The United States refused to publish an official denunciation of the extermination of Europe’s Jews, despite being well informed by clandestine reports and alerted by telegrams. News of the Soviet victory in Stalingrad reached the Warsaw ghetto.The course of the war was starting to tip in the Allies’ favor, and the Third Reich’s armies were being pushed back.

For the survivors of the ghetto, there was nothing left to lose. In April 1943, the ghetto rose up. In August, then in October 1943, the prisoners in Treblinka and Sobibor revolted. But Himmler ordered the units of Special Action 1005 to erase all trace of the genocide in the extermination camps. On the morning of 3 November 1943, the liquidation of the Majdanek camp began: Jews were shot dead in ditches.

By nightfall, 18,000 people had died. In all the death camps, the men of Special Action 1005 disinterred bodies and built huge pyres, grinding the ashes so no trace remained. The gas chambers, the crematoriums, the shacks; everything was destroyed. The Allied advance pushed ahead at greater pace and Hungary considered switching sides and joining them.

In March 1944, the Wehrmacht occupied the country, and the deportation of 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began several weeks later. As the noose tightened on the Nazi regime, caught between the Red Army to the east and to the west by the Anglo-Americans who had landed in Normandy in June 1944, many camps were evacuated between August and November of that year, amid scenes of untold chaos and violence.

When the Red Army entered Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek, the camps had ceased to operate and were practically empty; only those too weak to have been “evacuated” were still there. In the eyes of certain high-ranking Nazis like Himmler, salvation was now a matter of negotiating a surrender, but the opportunity quickly evaporated. Hitler then Goebbels committed suicide, as the Red Army entered Berlin.

On 8 May, Germany surrendered unconditionally, and the Third Reich was at an end. Himmler was captured at the end of May by the British and also committed suicide. With the end of the Second World War, the Allies began to organize the return of prisoners of war and deportees. Fewer than 1,000 people survived the death camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, out of 1.85 million deported.

Those who made it home felt like the last of the Jews. In six years of war and 12 years of power, Hitler had annihilated nearly all of Europe’s Jews.