Lara Carleton's List: ISU - Holocaust

• mass murder of some 6 million European Jews (as well as members of some other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War.

• mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland.

• Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million
• killed nearly two out of every three European Jews
• Euthanasia Program.

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• extermination of the Jews
• The Nazis thus tried to keep their own “race” free from abnormalities and illnesses (eugenics) and keep the Aryan race closed to other ”inferior” races (racial segregation and extermination).
   In the name of eugenics the Nazis initiated forced sterilisations of the hereditary ill and carried out euthanasia (emergency killings) on around 200,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans.
• persecute all non-Aryans, first of all Jews
• solution to the ’Jewish Question’
• The Nazis began to deport Jews from the German-controlled areas to ghettos in Poland and Russia, beginning with the Polish Jews but soon including German Jews as well.
• Starting in 1941, Jews were executed and murdered on a scale utterly unknown up until then.
• Large-scale executions of Jews, Poles and Russians took place, most frequently carried out by the four so-called Einsatzgruppen.
• mass executions were initiated in six “killing centres”, extermination camps situated in Poland
• died in the concentration camps, the ghettos and elsewhere as a result of hunger, slave labour and random executions.
• Nazi regime was behind the murder of more than 6 million Jews between 1941 and 1945.

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• Nazis set up their first concentration camp, Dachau
• By the end of the war, 22 main concentration camps were established, together with around 1,200 affiliate camps, Aussenkommandos, and thousands of smaller camps.
• 1945, when Allied forces liberated the concentration camps at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and elsewhere, the world was shocked at the sight of images of dead bodies alongside half-dead people in these camps.
• A concentration camp was not the same as an extermination camp – camps constructed with the specific purpose of mass murdering Jews and other victim groups. Despite this fact, the concentration camps claimed many thousands of victims. Imprisonment in a concentration camp meant inhuman forced labour, brutal mistreatment, hunger, disease, and random executions. It is certain that several hundred thousand died in the concentration camps. In comparison, more than three million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps.
• ”different” people such as Jews, gypsies, and criminals were caught and placed in concentration camps – all in the name of the Nazis’ racial and regimentation ideology
• The camps could be divided into different categories according to their purpose and function: forced labour camps, work- and reformatory camps, POW camps, transit camps, police camps, women camps and ghetto camps. The extermination camps had a special position within the Nazi camp system.
• A typical concentration camp consisted of barracks that were secured from escape by barbed wire, watchtowers and guards. The inmates usually lived in overcrowded barracks and slept in bunk ”beds”. In the forced labour camps, for instance, the inmates usually worked 12 hours a day with hard physical work, clothed in rags, eating too little and always living under the risk of corporal punishment.
• The sick, the old and those who could not keep up with the work temp were “selected” and then killed with gas, injections or shot. Others were chosen for terrible pseudo-scientific experiments – most often losing their life.
• horrible destiny that hit those prisoners who ended up as Muselmänner. This was the name for an inmate so undernourished that he or she was a living dead – a living, round-shouldered skeleton. The Muselmänner were either killed or died before they were executed.
• Forced labour
• A morbid form of forced labour was instituted in 1941, according to which Jews should be “worked to death”.
• In Auschwitz and Majdanek, which had the role of both being a working and an extermination camp, Jews were divided upon arrival into those capable of working ands those not. The last group was sent directly to the gas chambers, whereas those able to work had to work themselves to death in SS’s industries – or they were executed when they worn down.
• Sachsenhausen, owned and operated by the SS
• is impossible to estimate the exact number of victims for the concentration camp system and of those who fell victim to the death marches.
•  to

  tal of 22 main concentration camps (Stamlager) were established, together with approximately 1,200 affiliate camps. Besides these, thousands of smaller camps existed in all parts of German-controlled Europe. The 22 main camps, in alphabetical order, were as follows: Arbeitsdorf, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Herzogenbosch, Kaunas, Krakow-Plaszow, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Mittelbau-Dora, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Riga-Kaiserwald, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Vaivara, Warsaw, Wewelsburg, Germany
• Extermination camps
• the period of 1941-1945, for the first time in the history of mankind, industrial plants were used to kill people. A total of six extermination camps were established for the genocide of the Jews, where the Nazis carried out the mass murder of 3 million Jews – half of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust.
• Chelmno was the first extermination camp to be established as part of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ – the Nazis’ systematic effort to exterminate the Jews
• quickly followed by the establishment of three more extermination camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor
• In the concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek two further extermination camps were established.
• The six extermination camps were all situated in former Poland and had mass murder as their purpose. Outside Poland at least two camps existed that in many ways resembled the six extermination camps in Poland: Jungfernhof (in Latvia) and Maly Trostinets (in Byelorussia).
• All of the extermination camps were thoroughly organised and resembled industrial plants to an alarming degree. However, only Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its advanced gassing facilities and crematoria, was marked by high technology. In crematoria I and II there were elevators from the gas chambers underground, where the Jews were murdered, to the crematoria, where the bodies were burned.
• The six extermination camps were established within a very short time. From December 1941 to December 1942 Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek all became operational. These sites were chosen because they were all situated near railway lines, in quiet rural areas of “far away” Poland, outside the spotlight of German and international public opinions.
• Six Extermination Camps
• Killing methods
• gas chambers was the most common method of mass murdering the Jews in the extermination camps
• use of gassing trucks
• mass shooting
• When the victims arrived to the extermination camps in overcrowded trains, they were herded out onto the arrival ramp. Here, German SS-men and perhaps brutal Ukrainian guards forced them to hand over their belongings and their clothes. Most of the victims had been told that they were merely to be moved to the east for new jobs and living places, and most of them had brought their favourite belongings.
• The bodies were looted of gold (from the teeth), before being thrown into large mass graves. In time, the bodies were burned – either in mass graves or in the crematoria – when, as the Soviet armies advanced through Poland, the Nazis tried to hide their terrible crime.
   There are few examples of uprisings in the extermination camps. In Sobibor and Treblinka prisoners tried to rebel in 1943, and the same was tried in Auschwitz in 1944. Only a very few managed to escape.

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• The Ghettos of Poland
• Polish Jews came under German rule after the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, and during 1940 most of them were being assembled in ghettos. The one in Warsaw was the largest of these and reached almost half a million residents. For the Jews, the situation in the ghettos was frequently terrible: hunger, disease and forced labour claimed many victims. Added to this, beginning in the summer of 1942, constant deportations to the extermination camps began to empty out the ghettos. From 1942-1943 around 2 million Polish Jews were murdered by gassing.
• the Nazis viewed the ghettos as a temporary measure. It was by no means the intention that they exist in the long run. The local German occupation authorities merely wanted to make sure that they could easily move the Jews - ‘when the time came’. Besides this, the intention of this policy was to isolate the Jews from the rest of the Polish population and make them give up their businesses, apartments, etc. As in Germany, the Jews were to disappear from public life.
   
• As a result of the massive number of ghettos being established, almost all of the Polish Jews lived in some form of ghetto by the end of 1941 - 500,000 in the ghetto of Warsaw alone.
• the first deportations of German Jews to the east were initiated. In order to make room for them in the overcrowded Polish ghettos, it was deemed “necessary” to have the weakest Jews (those unable to work) murdered
• Nazis tried to develop a method for quickly and effectively killing many people. In the course of 1941 such a method was discovered: gassing.
• first mass killings with the use of gas were carried out in the newly founded extermination camp Chelmno in December of 1941
• The operation to exterminate the Polish Jews was called ‘Operation Reinhard’, named after the head of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated in June 1942. 
• only about 300,000 Jews were alive in the General Government by the end of 1942. The rest had perished, either of hunger, illness, forced labour, or by gassing in the extermination camps.
• the great uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1943. At that time, approximately 300,000 of the ghettos’ residents had been systematically exterminated in Treblinka, and the ghetto had only 70,000 residents left. Starting in October 1942, armed resistance groups were established. In January 1943, they carried out their first act of armed resistance against the Germans.
• Jewish uprising was crushed
• Himmler ordered several branches of the SS to participate in the coming mass murder in the Soviet Union
• Einsatzgruppen, consisting of men from different branches of the SS. These special units were established in the spring of 1941 and were each given a special area of operation.
• The size of the Jewish population in the Soviet Union, before as well as after the war, is unknown.

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• Adolf Hitler and the Nazis sent six million European Jews to their deaths in organized killings known as the Holocaust. Families were separated and destroyed.
• Gestapo
   Definition: The Nazi secret police, members had broad powers to act against "threats" to the state including arresting people and sending them to concentration camps.
   Context: The Gestapo was considered above the law; it could order people to be tortured or executed without any judicial review.
• Holocaust
   Definition: A period in the late 1930s through 1945 during which six million Jews were sent to death camps and killed as part of an organized extermination program
   Context: The Holocaust is considered one of the darkest times in world history, during which innocent men, women, and children were killed for no reason other than their ethnic heritage and religious beliefs.

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• at a party with local SS officials on his 34th birthday. Schindler attempted to use his connections with German officials to obtain information that might protect his Jewish employees. Krakow, Poland, April 28, 1942
• “The persecution of Jews in the General Government in Polish territory gradually worsened in its cruelty. In 1939 and 1940 they were forced to wear the Star of David and were herded together and confined in ghettos. In 1941 and 1942 this unadulterated sadism was fully revealed. And then a thinking man, who had overcome his inner cowardice, simply had to help. There was no other choice.”
    —Oskar Schindler, 1964 interview
• an unlikely hero
• ethnic German living in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, he joined the Nazi party in 1939
• the German invasion of Poland, Schindler went to Krakow
• He assumed responsibility for the operation of two formerly Jewish-owned manufacturers of enamel kitchenware and then established his own enamel works in Zablocie, outside Krakow.
• Moved by the cruelties he witnessed, Schindler contrived to transfer his Jewish workers to barracks at his factory.
• In late summer 1944, through negotiations and bribes from his war profits, Schindler secured permission from German army and SS officers to move his workers and other endangered Jews to Bruennlitz, near his hometown of Zwittau. Each of these Jews was placed on “Schindler’s List.” Schindler and his workforce set up a bogus munitions factory, which sustained them in relative safety until the war ended.
• Oskar Schindler’s transformation from Nazi war profiteer to protector of Jews

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• February 1939, five months after the German annexation of the Sudetenland, he joined the Nazi Party. An opportunist businessman with a taste for the finer things in life, he seemed an unlikely candidate to become a wartime rescuer. During World War II, Schindler rescued more than 1,000 Jews from deportation to Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's largest killing center.
• While Schindler operated two other factories in Krakow, only at Emalia did he employ Jewish workers who resided in the nearby Krakow ghetto.
• Although the prisoners deployed at Emalia were still subject to the brutal conditions of the Plaszow concentration camp, Schindler intervened repeatedly on their behalf, through bribes and personal diplomacy, both for the well-being of Jews threatened on an individual basis and to ensure, until late 1944, that the SS did not deport his Jewish workers. In order to claim the Jewish workers to be essential to the war effort, he added an armaments manufacturing division to Emalia. During the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943, Schindler allowed his Jewish workers to stay at the factory overnight.
• After the SS re-designated Plaszow as a concentration camp in August 1943, Schindler persuaded the SS to convert Emalia into a subcamp of Plaszow. In addition to the approximately 1,000 Jewish forced laborers registered as factory workers, Schindler permitted 450 Jews working in other nearby factories to live at Emalia as well, saving them from the systematic brutality and arbitrary murder that was part of daily life in Plaszow. Schindler did not act here without risk or cost; his protection of his Jewish workers and some of his shady business dealings led SS and police authorities to suspect him of corruption and of giving unauthorized aid to Jews. German SS and police officials arrested him three times, while he owned Emalia, but were unable to charge him.
• October 1944, after the SS transferred the Emalia Jews to Plaszow, Schindler sought and obtained authorization to relocate his plant to Brünnlitz (Brnenec) in Moravia, and reopen it exclusively as an armaments factory. One of his assistants drew several versions of a list of up to 1,200 Jewish prisoners needed to work in the new factory. These lists came to be known collectively as “Schindler's List.”
• Schindler met the specifications required by the SS to classify Brünnlitz as a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen concentration camp and thereby facilitated the survival of around 800 Jewish men whom the SS deported from Plaszow via Gross-Rosen to Brünnlitz and between 300 and 400 Jewish women from Plaszow via Auschwitz.
• Though classified as an armaments factory, the Brünnlitz plant produced just one wagonload of live ammunition in just under eight months of operation. By presenting bogus production figures, Schindler justified the existence of the sub-camp as an armaments factory and thus facilitated the survival of over 1,000 Jews, sparing them the horrors and brutality of conventional camp life. Schindler left Brünnlitz only on May 9, 1945, the day that Soviet troops liberated the camp.
• Schindler's story garnered more attention thanks to Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, based on a 1983 novel of the same name by Thomas Keneally that recounted Schindler's life and works. The movie received popular and critical acclaim.

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• Raoul Wallenberg
• Swedish Diplomat
• Immediately following his arrival as First Secretary to the Swedish embassy in  Budapest in July 1944, Wallenberg used his diplomatic status to issue  “protective passports” to thousands of Jews, identifying them as Swedish  citizens, thereby preventing their deportation to death camps.
• He would often personally intervene to obtain the release of
• these passport bearers, including those with forged documents, from the Jews who  were forced to march toward the Austrian-Hungarian border for deportation,  saving as many lives as possible. He even rented more than 30 buildings to house  about 10,000 Jewish refugees, putting up fake signs as “The Swedish Research  Institute” and hanging the Swedish flag to avoid detection.  All in all,  this soft-spoken Swede is credited to have rescued more Jews than any single  rescuer or country, around 100,000 of them; but he was unable to save his  own. 
• Giovanni Palatucci
• Italian Police Official and Lawyer
• When anti-Jewish laws were enacted in 1938, he used his authority as chief of  the Foreigners’ Office to forge travel papers that permitted hundreds of Jews  flee persecution in Eastern Europe and settle in Fiume, sometimes even providing  them with funds. However, his effort became riskier in 1943, when Mussolini’s  government fell and the Nazis occupied the place.
• In defiance against orders to arrest and deport the Jews in the area, he made  sure that they were sent instead to a prison-turned refugee camp managed by his  uncle, Bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, in Campania southern Italy, by  destroying documented records of some 5,000 Jewish refugees, thus saving them  from certain death in concentration camps.
• shy of his 36th birthday.
• in 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to Dachau, where he died just  a few months shy of his 36th birthday.
  
• Oskar Schindler
• German Industrialist
• initially sought to profit from the 1939 German invasion of Poland by hiding  wealthy Jews and employing around 1,000 cheap Jewish slave laborers for his  ammunition factory in Poland. However, appalled by the immense brutality of  Nazism, he began shielding his workers without any regard for cost.
• He smuggled children out of ghettos and used his connections in high places to  request for hundreds of Jews to be moved to an adjoining factory. He would call  on his legendary charm and persuasive eloquence to help his “Schindlerjuden”  (”Schindler Jews” as they came to be known) get out of difficult situations,  claiming that women, children, handicapped and unskilled workers were vital to  his business.
• died penniless at age 66 having spent all his wealth by the end of the war
• He is the only Nazi to be buried in a cemetery in  Jerusalem
• Andre Trocmé
• French Protestant Pastor
  
• Under their leadership, many private families willing to take in Jewish refugees  and children were located, and town schools got ready for a sudden increase in  the number of students.
• When forced to produce a list of Jews in the town, he responded, “We do not know  what a Jew is; we know only men.”
• Irena Sendler
• Polish Catholic Social Worker
• Sendler (Sendlerowa) and her friends produced thousands of false documents to  help Jewish families prior to joining the resistance group Zegota (Council for  Aid to Jews). Upon her appointment as head of Zegota’s newly formed children’s  department, she organized the smuggling of some 2,500 children out of Warsaw  ghetto and had them placed in Polish families, orphanages and convents. She gave  each child a new identity and carefully recorded their names and placements so  that they could be returned to surviving relatives after the war.
• Her work was interrupted when she was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death  by the Gestapo in 1943. However, she was successfully rescued by Zegota before  her scheduled execution. She then went into hiding and resumed her work for  Jewish children for the remainder of the war. In 2003, she received Poland’s  highest civilian decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.
  
• “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this  Earth and not a title to glory.” – Sendler’s letter to Polish Parliament
• Nicholas Winton
• British Stockbroker
• Winton visited Prague at the invitation of a friend from the British Embassy and  was alarmed by the influx of refugees, endangered by the impending Nazi  invasion. He noticed that the refugee camps set up by the British team were  dealing mostly with the elderly and other vulnerable adults, but nothing was  being done for the children.
• he took it upon himself to organize the Czech Kindertransport, managing to save  669 children out eight trains prior to the outbreak of World War II and finding  them foster parents in England and Sweden.
• His exploits became known only in 1988 when his late wife discovered lists of  children and letters from their parents in the attic. He is very much revered as  the father who rescued his many “children” from certain death in Nazi camps.  Known as “Schindler of Britain,”
• Chiune Sugihara
• Japanese Diplomat
  
• With no discernible motivation other than to do the right thing, he started  issuing visas to all who applied including those who did not meet immigration  requirements, allowing them to enter Japan for up to 15 days, in direct  violation of his orders. He was subsequently reassigned to Berlin when the  Soviet took over Lithuania. While en route to the train station, he continued to  give out visas for a mob of desperate refugees surrounding his car. However,  many passports remained unstamped when he boarded the train, so he threw the  official stamp to the crowd.
• saved anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 Jews based on some estimates.
• the “Japanese Schindler,”
• “I cannot allow these people to die, people who have come to me for help with  death staring them in the eyes. Whatever punishment may be imposed on me, I know  I should follow my conscience.”
• Varian Fry
• American Journalist
  
• Distressed by what he personally saw of Nazi barbarities against Jews during his  1935 Berlin visit as a foreign correspondent for an American journal, the  Harvard-educated Fry started to help raise funds for European anti-Nazi  movements. Following the 1940 invasion of France, he went to Marseille and ran  an elaborate rescue network in direct opposition to French and even some  American authorities.
• Despite being under constant surveillance by the puppet Vichy regime, he was  able to secure visas with the aid of American Vice-Consul in Marseille Hiram  Bingham IV for around 3,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees
• escape to neutral Portugal before making their way to the United States.
• “American Schindler,”
• The Holocaust specifically targeted the Jews in what  the Nazi termed as the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Other victims of  the Nazi regime included gypsies, religious groups, the mentally and physically  disabled; homosexuals; prisoners of war; intelligentsia and political activists;  and races that were deemed inferior. Considering all the victims of Nazi  persecution, the total number of casualties is estimated to be between nine and  eleven million including six million Jews and two million Gentile Poles,  absolutely making World War II the costliest war in terms of human lives.

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• As the Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem safeguards the memory of the past and imparts its meaning for future generations. Established in 1953, as the world center for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem is today a dynamic and vital place of intergenerational and international encounter.

• Julian Bilecki
• he and his family hid 23 Jews in an underground bunker, saving them from Nazi  death squads in war-torn Poland
• A little group - several of them children and teenagers - escaped from the  Ghetto and survived the Nazi extermination finding their way to the Bilecki  farm.

• The Bilecki  family took them in and decided that with the few young, strong men in the group  of escapees they would build a bunker in a cave in the woods and camouflage it  with leaves and branches. The biggest problem was providing food. Food for the  villagers was scarce during these times, but how do you feed 23 extra people  without arousing suspicion? Somehow the Bileckis were able to ration enough food  for everyone. 
• temporary shelter was soon discovered by passers-by in the  woods and, fearing for their friends' lives, the Bileckis were forced to look  for another location, to build another bunker. The  second bunker was built very near to the Bileckis' own home.
• would jump from tree to tree to  deliver his bounty to his Jewish friends in order to avoid leaving tracks in the  snow.
• The Bileckis showed the desperate  Jews where to hide, helped them move when they were almost detected and brought  burlap sacks of food - mostly potatoes, beans and corn meal food - and clothes  regularly for a year. Once a week, someone from the family would come to sing  hymns to the Jews and share news from the outside world.

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• In 1942, Anne Frank and her family fleeing the horrors  of Nazi occupation, hid in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. Over the next two  years, Anne describes in her diary her frustrations at being confined, hungry,  bored and the threat of discovery.
  
  Her diary ends when they are  discovered in 1944 ...
  
• Anne Frank’s name is known around the world - the narrow canal side house where  she hid is a museum that is visited by more than 600,000 people a year.
  

• As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease.
• Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies of murdered prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were left standing.
• summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the sites of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the Jews of Poland had already been killed.
• The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp, in January 1945. The Nazis had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward (in what would become known as "death marches"), and Soviet soldiers found only several thousand emaciated prisoners alive when they entered the camp.
• There was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Soviets found personal belongings of the victims. They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair.
• following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and in Poland. Shortly before Germany's surrender, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrueck concentration camps.
• US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, a few days after the Nazis began evacuating the camp. On the day of liberation, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. They also liberated Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen.
• British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation.
• Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many were so weak that they could hardly move.
• Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery.

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• The death camp Majdanek in Poland was the first to be  liberated. Soviet soldiers entered the camp in the final stages of the war, on  July 23, 1944. Few  prisoners were found alive, but they did find 800,000 pairs of shoes.
• January 27, 1945, they  entered Auschwitz and there found  hundreds of sick and exhausted prisoners. The Germans had been forced to leave  these prisoners behind in their hasty retreat from the camp. Also left behind  were victims' belongings: 348,820 men's suits, 836,255 women's coats, and tens  of thousands of pairs of shoes
• Allies did not liberate their first camps until April 1945, when the British  entered Bergen-Belsen and the  Americans liberated Buchenwald and  Dachau.
• the Germans had attempted to empty the camps of surviving prisoners and hide all  evidence of their crimes, the Allied soldiers came upon thousands of dead bodies  "stacked up like cordwood," according to one American soldier. The prisoners who  were still alive were living skeletons.
• headline of one Army journalist’s story may have expressed the liberators’  feelings best, “Dachau Gives Answer To Why We Fought.”

• Even after the Allies arrived, many prisoners were beyond help.  In Bergen-Belsen, for example,  300 former prisoners died each day for a week. Half of the prisoners discovered  alive in Auschwitz died within a few  days of being freed. Nearly 2,500 of the 33,000 survivors of Dachau died within six weeks of  liberation. Disease, malnourishment, and mistreatment had worn them down too  much.
• Survivors had mixed reactions to their newfound freedom. While a few looked  forward to being reunited with other family members, some felt guilty for  surviving when so many of their relatives and friends had died.
• 'Freedom,' we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it."

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• The liberating units encountered deplorable conditions in the camps, where malnutrition and disease were rampant, and corpses lay unburied. The soldiers reacted in shock and disbelief to the evidence of Nazi atrocities. In addition to burying the dead, the Allied forces attempted to help and comfort the survivors with food, clothing and medical assistance.
• Though official reports were prepared at the time of liberation, individual soldiers often did not record their impressions of the camps until many years later. These accounts, recorded in the form of official unit histories, personal statements, and oral testimonies, provide an important resource in the study and understanding of the Holocaust.