The worst of all World War II’s secrets remained mostly hidden until the war was nearly over. Many people knew about the labor camps to which thousands of Jews and others were sent. Rumors spread about the bad conditions there, but it was only when the first camps were liberated in late 1944 that the world began to learn the full horror of the Holocaust: the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of occupied Europe.
As early as 1933, the Nazis began their anti-Jewish campaign in Germany, preventing the public from patronizing Jewish shops.
This mass murder of about six million Jews and the attempt to wipe out Jewish culture in Europe had its roots long before World War II. Hitler’s Nazi Party blamed the Jews for all of Germany’s problems, including the Great Depression. When they came to power in 1933, the Nazis brought in anti-Jewish laws, and Jews became increasingly isolated from German life. Attacks on Jews increased.
When the war began, SS troops followed the German army into conquered territories. They isolated Jewish communities in ghettos. In the Soviet Union, they killed them. In 1941, Nazi leaders decided on the “final solution to the Jewish question.” They ordered the building of death camps.
Jews from all over Europe were sent by cattle train to these camps. On arrival, elderly people and children were exterminated in gas chambers and their bodies were burned. The rest were used as slave labor and worked to death. In all, seven out of every 10 Jews living in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust.
A German woman is overcome as she walks past the bodies of some 800 slave workers murdered by SS guards. The bodies were laid here by the post-war government so that local people could view the work of their Nazi leaders.