In 1933, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels urges a Berlin crowd to boycott Jewish businesses.

November, Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass, was a large- scale coordinated attack on Jews throughout the German Riech.

By late 1941, the first Jews from Germany and western Europe were gathered and transported, along with many other minorities, to concentration camps in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, and western Russia

At first the camps were concentration or work camps. Inmates were forced to endure hard work, starvation, unsanitary conditions, and disease.

Some were taken in groups to secluded areas where they were stripped of clothing, pushed into open pits, machine-gunned, and then quickly covered over, in many cases before all were dead.

Following the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, January 20, 1942, the "Final Solution" was an official policy of the Nazi regime. More than half of the 6 million Jews who were murdered were systematically exterminated in the gas chamber/crematorium system of the Nazi Death Camps between 1942 and 1945.

When people arrived by train they were told go to the left which led to the gas chamber and crematorium or to the right to the labor camp. Families were separated never to see one another again.

Valuables were taken from the camp inmates upon their arrival. After extermination, even their gold fillings were extracted and melted down to be used in the war effort.

Chelmno _________________Killed 320,000 Auschwitz- Birkenau _______ Killed 1,200,000 Belzek____________________Killed 600,000 Sobibor___________________Killed 250,000 Treblinka__________________Killed 700,000 Majdanek__________________Killed 1,380,000 Stutthof __________________Killed 65,000

More than 90 percent of the victims sent to these extermination camps were Jews 200,000 Romany (Gypsies), homosexuals, 2-3 million Soviet POW’s, and 200,000 mentally or physically handicapped people.

. Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. It was a place of forced labor and mass murder.

Children at Auschwitz were also subjected to horrible medical experiments. Dr. Josef Mengele often presided over these experiments.

As Germany realized the end was near, they tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes against humanity. They burned and buried corpses and sent thousands of prisoners on death marches deep into German territory so the allies wouldn’t discover them.

In 1945, the concentration camp Dachau was one of the first that was liberated by allied troops.

After the war, many from the concentration camps along with others (prisoners of war, refugees, stateless persons, orphans, etc…) were put into Displaced Persons Camps.

Unfortunately, many Nazi war criminals, including Josef Mengele, also made their way to DP Camps.

“at least 10 top Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Erich Priebke and Josef Mengele... A statement issued by the ICRC, from its Geneva headquarters, said they were among thousands of people found in refugee camps who were given Red Cross travel documents.”

Some were later tracked down and prosecuted for war crimes but Mengele was never apprehended.

The state of Israel was created three years after the end of WWII. Many displaced Jews emigrated there.