Page 24 - Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations

MASS EXTERMINATION CAMPS
At the infamous Wannsee Conference held in Berlin, January 20, 1942, the Nazis formally agreed upon the estab- lishment of a number of camps in occupied Poland whose primary purpose was mass extermination through the use of poisonous gas. The estimated numbers of murders at each camp are chilling: Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1.1 million; Treblinka, more than 870,000 (Operation Reinhard); Belzec, 500,000 (Operation Reinhard); Chelmno, 300,000; Sobibor, 250,000 (Operation Reinhard); Majdanek, 80,000. In each case, the vast majority of those sent to the gas chambers were Jewish. Jews were shipped in to the camps from every European country conquered by the Nazis or allied to them – Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Soviet Union (including Belarus and Ukraine), and Yugoslavia.
The Death Marches that took place toward the end of WWII forced long columns of prisoners, under heavy guard, to walk over vast distances under intolerable conditions. The marches began in the summer of 1944 and continued right up to the Third Reich’s last days – the final Death March took place on May 7, the day before Germany surrendered in most places to the Allies. Approximately 750,000 prisoners, almost half of whom were Jewish, were forced on to the Death Marches and some 250,000 of those Jewish prisoners perished on the marches between the summer of 1944 and May of 1945.
Of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, approximately half were murdered in the death camps, two million or more were executed by the Einsatzgruppen and other Nazi killing units across Europe and their collaborators, and the remaining approximately one million were killed in ghettos, slave labor camps, on Death Marches, and by other methods. As was noted above, the Holocaust took place in virtually every country in Europe occupied by or allied with Nazi Germany. Notable exceptions were countries such as Albania and Denmark, where most of the Jewish population was saved through the heroic actions of local citizenry. (While Bulgaria did protect its own citizens, it deported more than 11,000 Thrace and Macedonian Jews to Treblinka, 18% of its total Jewish population.) In northern Africa, in Morocco (which was under the control of the Nazi-allied Vichy government
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