How many Jews were killed in World War II? How many Jews died in the Second World War. Hitler did not have mental illness

The history of mankind, perhaps, does not remember a more brutal crime than the Holocaust. This term is translated from Greek as “burnt offering” and became widespread only after the 1950s. The history of the victims of the Holocaust is a terrible catastrophe for European Jewry that began in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and established the absolute dictatorship of the National Socialists. The new government was guided by pseudoscientific racial theories and a thirst for cleansing the German nation of those considered objectionable. The Jews suffered the most crushing blow then, and even children became victims of the Holocaust.

• Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?
  • History of dislike for Jews
  • What do the experts say?
• Number of victims of the Holocaust
• International Holocaust Remembrance Day
• Holocaust Museums

Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?

History of dislike for Jews

To the question of why Jews became victims of the Holocaust, scientists and historians have several well-founded answers, and they all go back centuries.

Historically, Jews lived outside their homeland for many centuries. Living on the territory of other peoples, they preserved their language and religion. In appearance, clothing and traditions, they differed from Europeans. When Christianity arose, Judeophobic ideas about Jews began to form. The Catholic Church accused them of killing Jesus Christ.

In the 5th century, St. Augustine formulated the “correct” Christian attitude towards people of Jewish origin: you cannot kill Jews, but you can and should humiliate them. Thus, religious consciousness perceived the image of a Jew as something negative and unclean. As a result, Jews had to live in separate quarters, and the authorities limited their birth rate and freedom of movement. They were expelled from various states, including Russia. The connection between religious Judeophobia and state phobia was very close.

Video about the history of the victims of the Holocaust:

The concept of "anti-Semitism" first appeared in the 19th century. Anti-Semitic sentiments were especially popular in Germany. Hitler, who came to power, unified them into the Nazi ideology and sentenced the Jews to complete destruction. Nazi ideology assumed that the guilt of Jews lay in the very fact of their birth.

In addition, the list of victims of the Holocaust included all “subhumans” and “inferiors,” which were considered all Slavic peoples, homosexuals, gypsies, and the mentally ill.

The Nazis set themselves the goal of eradicating Jews from the face of the earth as a species, making the Holocaust their official policy.

What do the experts say?

Experts express different opinions about the reasons for such a large-scale and unprecedented destruction of people. It is especially unclear why millions of ordinary German citizens participated in this process.

• Daniel Goldhagen considers the main cause of the Holocaust to be anti-Semitism (national intolerance), which at that time massively captured the German consciousness.
• Leading Holocaust expert Yehuda Bauer has a similar opinion on this matter.
• The German historian and journalist Götz Ali suggested that the Nazis supported the policy of genocide because of the property taken from the victims and appropriated by ordinary Germans.
• According to the German psychologist Erich Fromm, the cause of the Holocaust lies in the malignant destructiveness that is inherent in the entire biological human race.

Number of victims of the Holocaust

The number of victims of the Holocaust is horrific: during World War II, the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews. However, many researchers now argue that in fact there were much more Nazi camps than was commonly believed just a few years ago. Accordingly, the number of victims also increases.

Historians have discovered about 42,000 institutions in which the Nazis isolated, punished and exterminated both Jewish and other groups of the population considered inferior. They pursued this policy over vast territories - from France to the USSR. But the largest number of repressive institutions were located in Poland and Germany.

So, in 2000, a project was launched, the goal of which was to search for death camps, forced labor camps, medical centers where pregnant women had abortions, prisoner of war camps and brothels whose inmates served the German military under duress. In total, more than 400 scientists took part in the project, taking into account the real facts and memories of Holocaust victims.

After the work, American researchers released new figures indicating how many victims of the Holocaust there actually were: about 20 million people.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated on January 27th. This day was approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005, calling on all member countries to develop and educate programs aimed at ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust are retained in the memory of all future generations. People around the world must remember these terrible events to be able to prevent future acts of genocide. Many countries around the world have created memorials and museums that commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Every year on January 27, mourning ceremonies, memorial events and events are held there.

Such events on this day are also held in the Auschwitz memorial camp - a complex of Nazi concentration and death camps where Slavs and Jews - victims of the Holocaust - died en masse in 1940-1945.

According to many scientists, it is very difficult for the human mind to fully comprehend genocide that originated in a state rich in spiritual traditions and developed culture. These monstrous events took place in civilized Europe almost before the eyes of the whole world. To ensure that a similar Holocaust will never happen again, people must strive to understand its origins and consequences.

The Myth of 6,000,000

It is impossible today to say exactly how many Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, and most likely it will never be possible to establish even an approximate number. But you can get some idea of ​​how the number of Jews killed during the war today is manipulated for their own purposes by unscrupulous historians and politicians...

Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Vice President Dick Cheney and other dignitaries from many countries are expected to attend the celebrations. They will undoubtedly remember the people tortured here by the Nazis, but hardly anyone will say a word about the fact that the history of Auschwitz is far from being as clear-cut as it might seem at first glance, and - most importantly - is inextricably linked with one of the most odious myths the second world war.

Years go by, but the question of the number of Jews killed during the Second World War does not lose its relevance and continues to occupy specialists in various fields - from historians to chemists unsuccessfully trying to understand the structure of gas chambers. Interest in this topic is maintained primarily by the Jews themselves, for whom the number of their victims, amazing the imagination of any normal person, has become one of the main justifications for both the creation of the State of Israel and its policies, and is also used to this day to present a wide variety of financial and political claims against states that were in one way or another involved in the “final solution” of the Jewish question. Suffice it to recall that Germany still pays compensation to victims of the “Holocaust”; that Switzerland was forced to pay billions of dollars for the accounts of European Jews kept in its banks; that many companies become victims of blackmail, boycotts and economic sanctions just on the slightest suspicion that they in any way collaborated with the Nazis. How exactly this happens, as well as the colossal material and moral capital Jewish organizations extracted and continue to extract from the death of their fellow tribesmen during the Second World War, is described in great detail in the excellent book of the Israeli researcher Norman Finkelstein, “Industry.” Holocaust" (Norman G. Finkelstein. The Holocaust Industry. Scientists such as David Irving, Kevin McDonald, Jean-Claude Pressac, Roger Garaudy, Robert Faurisson, Michael Hoffman, Ernst Zündel and others have done a lot to restore the truth. Many of them They paid for their activities with freedom. Zündel, for example, after serving several years in the United States, is now in a Canadian prison, and in Europe there are generally laws according to which even simple doubt about the official history of the “Holocaust” is a criminal offense. Soon there will be similar articles. included in the criminal code of America, Canada and other countries.

Considering how much money the "Holocaust industry" brings in to Jewish organizations, and the profitability of the role of victims in allowing the ovens of German concentration camps to be used as the main argument that ends any discussion of the Jewish question or Israeli policy, it is not surprising that the Zionists are doing everything possible to prevent a revision of the official statistics of victims of Nazism. On the other hand, it is for this reason that it is so important to understand how things really were. Is it really true, as it is written in all history textbooks and as everyone seems to know, that the Third Reich is to blame for the death of 6 million Jews?

According to the materials of the Wannsee Conference, at which the decision on the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was adopted, the total number of Jews living in the territories controlled by the Nazis at the end of 1941 was 4.5 million people. At that time, the Germans, known for their pedantry, had no reason to deceive themselves. But this figure is of great interest not only in comparison with the magic six million, but also in the light of the fact that, according to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1988 there were satisfied about 4.3 million claims for compensation to Holocaust survivors, which means that all these people were able to document that during the Second World War they were in German-occupied territory and were persecuted for their Jewish origin, but nevertheless survived. It would seem that, with these figures, one could easily determine the number of Jews killed by the Germans, but not everything, it turns out, is so simple. Thus, where big politics is involved, the laws of arithmetic, it turns out, lose their force.

It is impossible today to say exactly how many Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, and most likely it will never be possible to establish even an approximate number. The figure of 6,000,000 was initially obtained based on two sources. First, former SS officer Wilhelm Hottl testified at the Nuremberg trials that, according to Adolf Eichmann, who told him about it, 4 million Jews died in concentration camps and another 2 million died “elsewhere.” The second source is the testimony of the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, who reported that 4 million Jews died in the camp under his command alone. We will return to Hoess’s testimony below, but for now we will only note that even officially recognized Jewish researchers question these figures. For example, one of the leading experts on the history of the “Holocaust”, professor of political science at the University of Vermont and author of the textbook “Destruction of European Jewry”, Raul Hilberg, in an article for the Encarta encyclopedia, provides a list of all the concentration camps in which, according to him, there were gas chambers. This list, by the way, does not include such notorious camps as Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, which for many years were considered “death factories” - photographs allegedly taken there with mountains of corpses depicted on them went around the whole world. So, according to the data of Professor Hilberg, published, let us emphasize once again in the official "Microsoft" encyclopedia "Encarta", it turns out that 2.8 million Jews died in the gas ovens of Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz and three other camps, of which a million people - in Auschwitz. If this figure is true, then the figure of six million, obtained on the basis of Höss’s testimony about the four million who died in Auschwitz, must be at least halved. Hilberg himself, by the way, has repeatedly cited different figures for the total number of Jewish victims of the “Holocaust,” without providing any explanation for his inconsistency.

The truth, as mentioned above, we will probably never know. But some idea of ​​how the number of Jews killed during the war today is manipulated for their own purposes by unscrupulous historians and politicians can be obtained by following how the number of those “burned in the ovens” of perhaps the most famous German concentration camp, Auschwitz, has changed over the years. A detailed table of this data, indicating sources, was published in 2001 in the prestigious magazine Barnes Review, and it can be found on the Internet. Here are just a few examples from there.

Number of people allegedly killed at Auschwitz

9,000,000 French documentary film "Night and Fog", which was widely shown around the world.

8,000,000 French Ministry for the Investigation of War Crimes, December 1945

7,000,000 Data from the same ministry a year later

From 5,000,000 to 5,500,000 These figures were heard at the trial of the former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and were based on his written testimony. These testimonies, by the way, were written in English, which, as it was established, he did not speak.

4,000,000 The number of people killed in Auschwitz, officially established at the Nuremberg trials.

3,500,000 "French Dictionary" 1991 edition. The same figure was cited by the famous documentarian and author of the serial film “Shoah” Claude Lanzman in 1980 in his preface to Philipp Müller’s book “Three Years in the Auschwitz Gas Chamber.”

2,500,000 The figure given at the trial of Adolf Eichmann by the main prosecution witness Rudolf Vrba.

2,000,000 Figure given by three famous Holocaust researchers: Leon Polyakov in his book Harvest of Hate (1951); George Wellers in The Yellow Star in the Vichy Age (1973) and Lucy Davidovich in The War on the Jews (1975).

From 2,000,000 to 4,000,000 The leading Israeli expert on this issue, Yehuda Bauer, in his 1982 book “The History of the Holocaust.” However, in the 1989 edition, Bauer already names a different figure: 1,600,000. Moreover, in an article published in the Jerusalem Post, Bauer admitted that “higher numbers of victims have been refuted for many years, but these data have not yet been brought to public attention ".

1,500,000 In 1995, this figure was named by the then President of Poland Lech Walesa, citing research conducted by employees of the Auschwitz Museum. She “replaced” the previously considered official number of 4,000,000, which was erased from the monument erected in Auschwitz back in 1990. At the same time, information about one and a half million victims of Auschwitz was published in the Washington Times and London Daily Telegraph.

1,250,000 Historian Raoul Hilberg in his 1985 book “The Destruction of European Jewry.” According to Hilberg, of this total of all those killed in Auschwitz, about a million were Jews.

1,000,000 Jean-Claude Pressac in the 1989 book “Auschwitz: Technology and Operation of Gas Chambers.” It is interesting to note that he wrote this book as a polemic against “Holocaust-denying” revisionist historians who questioned the number of people killed in Auschwitz.

From 775,000 to 800,000 Revised data by Pressak, which was included in his 1993 book "Auschwitz Crematoria: Mechanisms of Mass Murder." According to Pressac, of this death toll, 630,000 were Jews.

135,000 to 140,000 Data from the International Search Service of the Red Cross, based on twice-daily roll calls of Auschwitz prisoners.

73,137 (of which 38,031 were Jewish) This figure was first reported by The New York Times on March 3, 1991, based on archives known as the Auschwitz Books of the Dead. These 46 volumes of the “book” were captured by Red Army soldiers at the end of the war and kept in Soviet archives until 1989, when they were handed over to the Red Cross. These “books” contain all the death certificates of all camp prisoners, indicating the full name, profession and religious affiliation of the deceased, as well as the date and place of birth, previous place of residence, names of parents, time and cause of death, which was determined by the camp doctor. In general, according to German archives, the number of deaths in all German concentration camps in the period from 1935 to 1945. is 403,713 people, and this number includes representatives of all races and peoples, as well as those who died from typhoid and other infectious diseases or who died of natural causes from old age.

This is the “scatter” of numbers and opinions, but in any case, no self-respecting historian today can even name the figure of 4 million. Why, then, one might ask, in this simple arithmetic problem, the total number of Jews killed during the war has not yet been revised and remains at 6 million?

As mentioned above, almost all Jewish organizations - from public to governmental in Israel - are vitally interested in preserving and maintaining this myth. Banks are also interested in this, pumping out billions in compensation for millions of victims.

For these reasons, it is unlikely that it will be possible to establish the exact number of victims, and, strictly speaking, that is not the point. No one is going to justify the atrocities of the Nazis or discount the suffering and horrors endured by those who fell into their hands. But falsifying the history of the Second World War and manipulating for one’s own selfish interests the number of people who died in fascist concentration camps is, in fact, an outrage against the memory of those who actually fell victim to the “brown plague.” Including, naturally, the memory of the Jews killed by the Germans.

From the very beginning of the war, it was part of Nazi Germany's policy to kill civilians en masse. This was especially true for the Jews - later Hitler put forward the policy of the “final solution”, that is, the complete extermination of the Jews. Death squads led to the death of about a million people, later numerous massacres began to occur, and then concentration camps appeared, where prisoners were deprived of proper food and medical care. The final point was the construction of death camps - government institutions, the purpose of which was the systematic murder of huge numbers of people.

In 1945, when Allied forces overran many of the camps during the offensive, they discovered the results of this Nazi policy: hundreds of thousands of hungry and sick prisoners who were locked away along with thousands of dead bodies. And in addition, gas chambers, huge crematorium buildings, thousands of mass graves, thousands of volumes of documentation on inhumanly cruel medical experiments, and much more were discovered. The Nazis killed more than ten million people, including six million Jews.
Lebensunwertes Leben, in other words, “life unworthy of life.” One of the most horrific terms in history was used by the soldiers of Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives they believed were insignificant, of no importance - or to designate those who were to be killed. At first, this term was applied exclusively to people suffering from various mental disorders; later it began to designate “racially inferior” or “suffering from sexual deviations” or simply “enemies of the state,” both internal and external.


1. An exhausted eighteen-year-old Russian girl looks into the camera lens during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. The Dachau concentration camp was the first German concentration camp. It was opened in 1933. More than 200,000 people were held here in inhumane conditions between 1933 and 1945. Officially, 31,591 deaths were announced. Deaths were caused by disease, malnutrition and suicide. Unlike Auschwitz, Dachau was not officially a “death camp”, but the conditions of prisoners there were so terrible that hundreds of people died every week.

2. This photograph was provided by the Paris Holocaust Memorial Foundation. It depicts the execution of a Ukrainian Jew by a German soldier during a mass shooting of local residents in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, approximately between 1941 and 1943. This photograph, entitled “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” (this was the inscription on the back of the photograph), was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier.

3. German soldiers interrogate Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In October 1940, the Germans began moving more than 3 million Jews living in Poland into overcrowded ghettos. In the largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, thousands of Jews died due to ongoing epidemics of disease and starvation. In addition, the Nazis soon began mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first mass uprising against the Nazi occupation of Europe, lasted from April 19 to May 16, 1943. It began after German soldiers and police entered the ghetto to deport the surviving residents. The uprising ended when the poorly armed rebels were defeated by outnumbered and well-equipped German troops.

4. A man takes away the bodies of dead Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. People here were dying of hunger right on the streets. Every morning, around 4-5 am, funeral carts collected several dozen dead bodies. The bodies of dead Jews were burned en masse in deep pits.

5. A group of Jews, including a small boy, are led out of the Warsaw ghetto, accompanied by German soldiers. The photo was taken on April 19, 1943. This photograph was part of SS General Stroop's report to his command, and was presented as evidence of Nazi atrocities during the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945.

6. After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the ghetto was completely destroyed. Of the more than 56 thousand Jews who were held there, about 7,000 were shot and the rest were deported to death camps or concentration camps. This photo shows the ruins of the ghetto, which was blown up by German troops. The Warsaw ghetto lasted for several years, during which time approximately 300,000 Polish Jews died there.

7. A German in military uniform shoots a Jewish woman during a mass shooting in Mizoche, Ukraine. In October 1942, 1,700 people in the Mizoč ghetto rebelled against the Germans and the local policemen who joined them. About half of the residents were able to escape or hide during the uprising. As a result, the uprising was finally suppressed. The survivors were captured, they were taken to a ravine and shot. Photos courtesy of the Paris Holocaust Memorial Foundation.

8. Jews deported at the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942. Drancy was the last stop before people were placed in German concentration camps. An estimated 13,152 Jews (including 4,115 children) were rounded up by French police and taken from their homes to the Vel d'Hiv, a winter stadium in southwest Paris, in July 1942. They were later taken to the train terminal in Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east. Only a few later managed to return home.

9. Anne Frank, photograph taken in 1941. The image was provided by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In August 1944, Anna, her family and others who were hiding from the occupying German forces were captured and sent to prisons and concentration camps. Anna died of typhus at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her posthumously published diaries made her a symbol of all Jews who died in World War II.

10. The arrival of Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, a region that was ceded to Hungary in 1939 but previously belonged to Czechoslovakia, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, an extermination camp in Poland, in May 1944. The photo was provided by Lily Jacob in 1980.

11. Fourteen-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, photographs of the personal file of a prisoner of the Auschwitz camp. The photo is in the museum at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where about 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died during World War II. Czeslawa, a Polish and Catholic woman originally from Wolka Zlojecka, Poland, was sent to Auschwitz with her mother in December 1942. Three months later, both were already dead. Wilhelm Brasse, one of the prisoners whose job it was to take photographs of the prisoners, spoke about Czeslaw in a documentary filmed in 2005. “She was so young and she was so scared. The poor girl didn't understand why she was there, and she couldn't understand what exactly they were telling her. The warden got angry, took a stick and started hitting her in the face. This German woman simply took out her aggression on the girl. This young girl was so beautiful, so innocent. She cried, but she couldn't do anything. Before I photographed her, she wiped away tears and blood from a cut on her lip. I couldn’t help her, alas.”

12. Victim of a Nazi medical experiment in Ravensbrück, Germany, in November 1943. A deep phosphorus burn is visible on the victim's hand. The photograph shows the results of a medical experiment with phosphorus, which was carried out by doctors at Ravensbrück. During the experiment, a mixture of phosphorus and rubber is applied to the skin and set on fire. Twenty seconds later, the fire was extinguished with water. Three days later, the wound was treated with Echinacin solution. After two weeks the wound was healing. This photograph, taken by a camp doctor, was present as evidence of Nazi atrocities during the Nuremberg doctors' trial.

13. Jewish prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp, after liberation from the camp in 1945

14. American soldiers silently inspect railway cars containing dead bodies that were discovered on a railway line at the Dachau camp in Germany, May 3, 1945.

15. An emaciated Frenchman sits among the dead at the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp in Nordhausen, Germany, in April 1945.

16. Dead bodies lie against the wall of a crematorium in a German concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. The bodies were discovered by American Seventh Army troops who captured the camp on May 14, 1945.

17. An American soldier inspects thousands of gold wedding rings that were seized from Jews by the Germans in Salt Heilbronn in Germany, May 3, 1945.

18. Three American soldiers look at dead bodies in an oven at a crematorium in April 1945. The photo was taken at an unidentified concentration camp in Germany, as the camp was being liberated by US Army soldiers.

19. A pile of ashes and bones at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar in Germany, April 25, 1945.

20. Prisoners at the electrified fence of the Dachau concentration camp greet American soldiers. The exact date of the photo is not known. Some of the prisoners are dressed in blue and white striped prison clothes. They decorated their barracks with secretly made flags that they had made when they heard the approaching gun salvos of the 42nd Rainbow Division as they approached Dachau.

21. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other American officers at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, shortly after the liberation of the camp in April 1945. When American troops came into close proximity to the camp, the guards shot and killed the prisoners.

22. A dying prisoner at the Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany on April 18, 1945.

23. Prisoners on the death march from Dachau move south along Noerdliche Muenchner in Grunewald, Germany, April 29, 1945. Many thousands of prisoners were forcibly transferred from remote prisoner of war camps to camps deep within Germany as Allied forces approached the borders. Thousands of people died along the way; those who were unable to keep up were executed on the spot. Fourth from the right in the photo is Dmitry Gorky, who was born on August 19, 1920 in Blagoslovsky, Russia, into a peasant family. During World War II, Dmitry was imprisoned in Dachau prison for 22 months. The reasons for his imprisonment are unknown. The photo was provided by the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

24. American soldiers walk between rows of corpses that lie on the ground outside the barracks at the Nazi concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany, April 17, 1945. The camp is located 70 miles west of Leipzig. When the camp was liberated by Allied forces on April 12, U.S. Army soldiers discovered more than 3,000 bodies and a meager handful of survivors.

25. A dead prisoner in a train carriage near the Dachau concentration camp in May 1945.

26. Lieutenant General George S. Patton of the 3rd Army, XX Corps of the Allied Army at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, April 11, 1945.

27. General Patch's Twelfth Armored Division, fighting its way to the Austrian border, stumbled upon the horrors of the German concentration camp at Schwabmunchen, southwest of Munich. More than 4,000 slaves, Jews from different countries, were housed in the prison. Many prisoners were burned alive by the guards, who set fire to the barracks in which the prisoners slept, shooting at anyone who tried to escape. The photograph of the dead bodies at Schwabmunchen was taken on May 1, 1945.

28. The body of a prisoner lies on a barbed wire fence in Leipzig Thekla, south of the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany.

29. These dead bodies of German victims were taken from the Lambach concentration camp in Austria on May 6, 1945 by German soldiers on the orders of American troops. The camp initially housed eighteen thousand people. There were no beds or bathrooms provided, and forty to fifty prisoners died every day.

30. A young man sits on an overturned stool next to a burned body at the Thekla camp outside Leipzig, in April 1945, after American troops entered Leipzig on April 18. On this day, April 18, workers at the Thekla aircraft plant were locked in an isolated room and burned alive with incendiary bombs. About 300 prisoners died. Those who managed to escape were executed by members of the Hitler Youth, according to the report of an American captain

31. The burned bodies of political prisoners lie at the entrance to a barn in Gardelegen, Germany, on April 16, 1945, where they met their deaths at the hands of German SS troops who set the barn on fire. A group of people tried to escape and were shot by the SS troops. Of the 1,100 prisoners, only twelve managed to escape.

32. Dead bodies found by soldiers of the US Army's Third Armored Division at the German concentration camp at Nordhausen on April 25, 1945, where hundreds of "slaves" of various nationalities were held.

33. When American troops liberated prisoners at the Dachau camp, Germany, in 1945, many German guards were killed by the prisoners, who then dumped their bodies in a ditch surrounding the camp.

34. Lt. Col. Ed Seiler of Louisville, Kentucky, stands among the bodies of Holocaust victims, speaking with 200 German civilians who were led to the Landsberg concentration camp, May 15, 1945.

35. Exhausted and exhausted prisoners, almost dead from hunger, at the concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria, May 7, 1945. The camp had a reputation as a place. where prisoners were used for “scientific” experiments.

36. Freed by soldiers of the Third Armored Division of the American First Army, a Russian identifies a former camp guard who brutally beat prisoners on April 14, 1945 at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia, Germany.

37. Dead bodies at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after British troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945. British soldiers found 60,000 men, women and children dying of hunger and disease.

38. German SS soldiers load the bodies of victims - prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - into trucks for burial, in Belsen, Germany, April 17, 1945. In the background is a British armed convoy.

39. Citizens of Ludwigslust, Germany, inspect nearby concentration camps on orders from the 82nd Airborne Division on May 6, 1945.

40. Thousands of dead bodies at Bergen-Belsen, in Bergen, Germany, found after the liberation of the camp by British troops on April 20, 1945. The approximately 60,000 civilians held there, victims of typhus, typhoid and dysentery, died in the hundreds every day, despite the desperate efforts of medical personnel rushed into the camp after its liberation.

41. Joseph Kramer, commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Belsen, photograph taken April 28, 1945. After a trial, Kramer, the "Monster of Belsen", was convicted and executed in December 1945.

42. Women from SS units unload the bodies of their victims from trucks at a concentration camp in Belsen, Germany, April 28, 1945. Hunger and disease led to the death of hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the camp. British soldiers are in the background.

43. A German SS soldier is among hundreds of corpses during a mass grave in Belsen, Germany, in April 1945.

44. Piles of dead bodies in the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, April 30, 1945. Approximately 100,000 people died in this camp.

45. A German woman closes her son's eyes as they pass a row of exhumed bodies outside Suttrop, Germany. The bodies of 57 Russians killed by German SS troops were thrown into a mass grave before the arrival of the US Ninth Army. Before the burial, all German civilians in the area were gathered to see the victims with their own eyes.

In April 1943, the Bermuda Conference took place, the participants of which limited themselves to an exchange of views on the problem of Jewish refugees and decided that the issue of providing assistance to the surviving Jews should be postponed until after the war!

During World War II and after it, the British government did everything to prevent Jewish survivors from entering Palestine and other parts of the empire. Moreover, it did not agree to recognize them as either prisoners or political emigrants. The shameful pages in the history of England in those years were the events that unfolded around three ships with Jewish refugees.

In November 1940, after a multi-day voyage, the Atlantic steamship arrived at the port of Haifa with 1,800 passengers on board. The British authorities interned them and deported every single one of them to Mauritania.

Another ship, the Salvador (several hundred refugees, including children), sank in December 1940 off the coast of Palestine without receiving help.

And finally, Struma. This Romanian ship, designed for only 100 passengers and also in disrepair (holes, machine malfunction), took 769 refugees on board in the Romanian port of Constanta and sailed to Haifa on December 16, 1941. It crashed near Istanbul, but the Turks said they would not allow the refugees to disembark unless they had permission from the British authorities to enter Palestine. The British did not give such permission. The ship remained at anchor for ten days, and on February 24, 1942, despite the captain’s assurances that the ship was unseaworthy, the Turks towed it to the open sea.

The Struma sank six miles from the coast. Only two people survived. Before the ship left for the open sea, officials received permission from the British authorities for only 70 children to enter Palestine.

At this time, terrible events took place in Romania. Back in January 1941, the American ambassador to this country, Gunter, reported on a massacre carried out by the Iron Guard, resulting in the death of more than 700 Jews.

Three weeks later, the tragedy of the ships became the subject of an inquiry from Deputy Lipron. He accused the government of the fact that if the Struma had been an enemy ship, then the Germans, Italians or Japanese would certainly have been interned and detained until the end of the war, while it refused to do so in the case of Jewish refugees.

Mr. Macmillan, Assistant Secretary at the Colonial Office, responded: “We must not take action that is contrary to our policy on the question of illegal immigration.” Secretary of State Lord Cranborne cynically remarked: “the situation in which the world now finds itself requires some degree of habituation to such atrocities.”

It was as if everyone had conspired against the Jews. Even the Swiss police chief, Rothmund, who ordered the provision of asylum to political emigrants on August 13, 1942, warned that “refugees for racial reasons will not be considered as such.”

Churchill had difficulty admitting: “The Jews were Hitler’s first victims and from the very beginning they were on the front line of the fight against National Socialism.” Things didn't go further than these words. On March 23, 1943, a debate took place in the House of Lords on the issue of saving the Jews, but the gates of Palestine remained closed to them after that. Nevertheless, between 1939 and 1945, approximately 90,000 Jews reached Palestine illegally.

The words of Ben-Gurion, spoken by him in 1943, sound with pain and anger: “You peoples who preach the ideals of freedom and justice, who consider themselves defenders of democracy and champions of social progress, why don’t you rush to help, seeing how our blood? Why are you mocking our grief by offering cheap and meaningless condolences?”

In order to avoid presenting our own, perhaps subjective views on the role of Atikan in the tragedy of the Jews, we will present to the reader several reliable evidence on this issue.

Here is the content of the speech of the former General Secretary of the World Jewish Congress, Dr. G. Rieger (Geneva), delivered in the Church of St. Anne in Dresden and entitled “Warnings Heard by Few—The Actions of the World Jewish Congress in Hitler's Time” (we quote from “Signs of Light,” a collection of joint works of the Catholic Church and the synagogue dated March 5, 1986): “First of all, he said, that he is very excited to be able to address the German people again after 52 years. He left his hometown of Berlin and Germany in 1933, when he and his family were expelled under the “Aryan paragraph” of the Nuremberg Law. Characteristic of that time was people's underestimation of the events taking place. Many thought that National Socialism was just an episode, and only a few understood that Nazism knew no boundaries, neither moral nor ethical.

As Vice-President of the Congress, Dr. Rieger spoke primarily about attitudes towards ATIKAN. The first contacts between the Congress and ATIKAN were established only in 1942, in the face of impending tragedy. As a result, the Vatican intervened in the events taking place in Slovakia, and a brief lull established there. However, this did not happen in other countries, most notably Germany.

The second stage began after the US government appealed to ATIKAN in the fall of 1942 with a request to confirm information about the extermination of Jews. Atikan Secretary Cardinal Maglioni responded that he did not believe there was data to support these serious concerns.

In the following months, the Vatican received numerous reports confirming suspicions that the “destruction of the Jews through mass murder” was taking place. In December 1942, a statement from the allied countries was published publicly condemning the “extermination” of Jews. A similar statement came from the Polish government in exile. The governments of the United States and many Latin American countries demanded a public condemnation (declaration) from the pope. Pius XII, in his speech on the occasion of the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, delivered in 1942 on Vatican Radio, described the current situation, but did not emphasize the special situation of the Jews. According to the referee, the conviction was “very brave”; from the point of view of today, it can be called “extremely weak.”

The response of the Anglican Church in England to the extermination of the Jews was extremely convincing. In 1944, this church provided effective assistance to Hungarian Jews during their deportation. Thanks to the intervention of the Atikan and the Hungarian Church, many Jews were saved in Hungary. However, according to Dr. Rieger, Vatican diplomacy has failed to understand the full tragedy of the current situation. The position of the temporary seventh Council of Churches was completely different, and two individuals deserve special mention: Issert Hooft, who later became the general secretary of the Council, and his predecessor in this post, the German diplomat and confessional church pastor Adolf Freudenberg, who led the provision of assistance to refugees. Unlike ATIKAN, the World Council of Churches constantly maintained an exchange of information with the World Jewish Congress.”

The historical truth about the help that the Poles provided to the Jews is sometimes distorted for various reasons. A classic example of document manipulation is Stefan Krakowski’s essay “Polish Society and Jewish Fugitives in hiding, 1942–1944.” In November 1984, the First International Conference on Polish-Jewish relations in the light of modern history was held at the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies in Oxford. And this is how S. Krakovsky sees these relations.

The primary sources he relied on were diaries, stories, and memoirs of surviving Jews and Poles who had contact with Jews in hiding or witnessed the assistance provided to them. Additional material consists of underground literature. The research did not take into account the Arshav district and the territories that belonged to the Germans, but the situation in the lands of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders before 1938 was analyzed, which determines the statistics given by the author. After all, S. Krakovsky was well aware that Bendera’s troops exterminated thousands of Poles there, and tens of thousands more fled. There are too few Poles left in these territories to be accused of treating Jews poorly.

Despite this, being themselves in mortal danger, the Poles, to the best of their ability, helped the persecuted Jews. from, for example, the testimony of Adam Landesberg: “Especially in the eastern territories, Ukrainian gangs prowled, handing over people to the Germans, killing and robbing. In this area, near Zholkiev, the Jews were constantly helped by the Polish village of Kosteev. The people from this village gave food to the hungry and clothing to the naked.”

Another example: in Lviv, in his house on Stryiskaya Street, Joseph Sokha hid several dozen people, and after the end of the war he did not want to hear about any reward, considering what he had done to be his Christian duty. The author of the abstract most likely did not take such cases into account.

The abstract examined 2,000 documents and described 1,000 cases that occurred in 767 localities. Based on this by no means indicative material, Krakowski came to the following conclusions: thanks to the help provided by the Poles, 2,652 people of Jewish nationality were saved. The number of identified Poles who hid or helped hide Jews is 965. 80 Poles were shot for assistance provided to Jews.

The number of identified Jews killed or handed over to the Germans by the Poles is 3,037. In 120 settlements, murders of Jews by the underground (the National Armed Forces and, in part, the Home Army) were registered, including those committed by “AK people” after the formal liquidation of the AK in January 1945.

Based on such arbitrarily analyzed data, the author of the abstract concludes: “Therefore, we consider ourselves authorized to emphasize that while the majority of crimes against hiding Jewish fugitives were committed by underground organizations, acts of assistance to Jews were, for the most part, individual in nature, based on goodwill. the will of benefactors and were not associated with the actions of the underground. Based on the total number of crimes and violence, the role of the Polish underground cannot but be assessed as definitely negative.”

It is difficult to find a suitable definition for this “scientific work”, given that such public appearances are not isolated.

Describing the martyrdom of the Jewish people on Polish lands, one cannot help but touch upon the issue of assistance provided by the Poles to the persecuted Jews. How can we explain that there was so little help for Jews in the territories occupied by the Germans, including Poland?

This problem was resolved differently in different countries. This depended on many circumstances, including whether the country was a “subject” of the occupier, what the standard of living of its inhabitants was, and who led the state.

Things weren't going well for Poland. After 123 years of dependence on other powers, it was necessary to unite the people and restore the very foundations of the state, economic and other systems. The country was destroyed by war, remained deeply backward, poor, and was inhabited by citizens of different nationalities, including representatives of a large Jewish community. Over a twenty-year period, the Polish government has done a lot for the country, but also made many mistakes in national and religious politics. Power was controlled by the army with the support of the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church.

The pastoral letter of Cardinal Hlend, head of the Church in 1936, gives us an opportunity to become familiar with the position of the Polish Church towards the Jews: “The Jewish problem exists and will exist as long as Jews remain Jews... The fact that Jews are opposed to the Catholic Church are freethinkers, the vanguard of godlessness, the Bolshevik movement and subversive work. It is a fact that Jewish influence on morals is detrimental, and their institutions and publishing houses promote pornography. It is also true that Jews are engaged in deception, usury, and trade in human goods. It is also true that in schools the influence of Jewish youth on Catholic youth, in religious and moral terms, is in most cases negative. But let's be fair. Not all Jews are like that. Many Jews are believers, decent, fair, merciful, and do good. Many Jewish families have a warm, healthy atmosphere. We know that in the Jewish environment there are morally outstanding, noble, respectable people.”

Here is an example of traditional Roman Catholic anti-Judaism, which condemns the use of violence against Jews, which is distinct from ethnic anti-Semitism and racism. It can be said that the pre-war Church was popular and national with a nationalistic and anti-Jewish slant.

Professor Raoul Hilberg, who appears in the film Shoah the main expert witness, says: “From the very beginning, Christians told Jews: “You cannot live among us as Jews.” The secular authorities at the end of the Middle Ages decided: “You cannot live among us.” Finally, the Nazis proclaimed: “You cannot live.”

The society of pre-war Poland, overwhelmingly Catholic, was under anti-Semitic influence instilled by the clergy, the episcopate and its press organs. The Polish authorities saw a partial solution to the problem of unemployment and Jewish control over various spheres of economic life in their mass emigration to Palestine.

A few decades later, Israel found itself in a similar situation with its Arab population. During the war with the Arabs in 1967–1968. Some 500,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced. Israeli media reported that 22 % Israelis consider the “best solution” to “get rid of” Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. This percentage is much higher when it comes to the eviction of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

This kind of practice, regardless of who carries it out, cannot be justified. But looking back decades later, it can be argued that the various pressures put on Eastern European Jews, including Polish Jews, to emigrate before World War II were an attempt on God's part to save them from certain destruction. One can only regret that only a small number of Jews took advantage of this chance.

The Red Army, entering the eastern territories of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the basis of the Ribentrop-Molotov Pact, met with an enthusiastic reception from the local Jewish poor, which was natural, since this was a temporary salvation for them. But we also need to understand the Poles, who saw the treacherous behavior of Jews, former citizens of the Polish state. This situation made it impossible to refute the many fabrications and exaggerations about the Jews, nor to provide evidence that Jewish traitors constituted an insignificant percentage compared to other nationalities.

The active position on the side of the Stalinist government, taken by the Jewish apostates from the religion of Moses, cast a shadow on all representatives of this people, turning the local population against them. To some extent, this explains the fact that when the Germans entered the mentioned Polish territories on June 22, 1941, part of the local population joyfully accepted them as deliverers from the Bolshevik regime. In Brest nad the Bug, prisoners released from Soviet prisons carried out pogroms against local Jews.

This incident conveys the atmosphere of those days. Rumors about the position taken by Jews during the Soviet occupation were exaggerated, and all crimes committed by the Stalinist regime were attributed to Jews. This partly explains the indifference and even hostility of the population towards the Jews.

On September 25, 1941, the commander-in-chief of the AK, General Grot-Rovetsky, reported in a telegram to the government in London: “It is a real fact that the vast majority of the country’s population is anti-Semitic... Anti-Semitism is widespread in the country.”

In August 1942, the writer Sophia Kossak wrote on behalf of the small Catholic group Polish Revival Front in a pamphlet entitled “Protest”: “Whoever remains silent when he sees a murder being committed becomes an accomplice to the murder. He who does not condemn allows... We, Polish Catholics, want to speak out. Our feelings towards Jews have not changed. We continue to consider them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we realize that they hate us more than the Germans, that they shift responsibility for their misfortunes onto us. Why, on what basis - remains a mystery of the Jewish soul, although this is a confirmed fact. However, awareness of these feelings does not free us from condemning crimes.”

This position of well-known representatives of Polish society simplifies the problem. It is a fact that the majority of Poles turned out to be indifferent to the plight of the Jews. But indifference is not complicity in a crime or a manifestation of anti-Semitism. However, many Jews studying this issue today do not notice this.

In Poland, unlike other countries occupied by German troops, from the very beginning of the occupation, power was seized by the German administration, which carried out all the orders of the Ermacht with methodical precision. Only someone who survived the inferno of the occupation can understand the terrible and difficult conditions in which the majority of the population of the occupied countries found themselves. Let us emphasize that a significant part of it did not help the persecuted Jews, which was explained not so much by anti-Semitism as by the disorientation of the ordinary resident, his low consciousness and enlightenment, but most often - by fear of the occupier’s revenge. Therefore, today one cannot draw too hasty and superficial conclusions about the people who lived both on one and the other side of the ghetto walls; it was a time of difficult trials.

Only individual Jews could escape death, but no one was able to save the people as a whole; Only those who left the country could change the course of events. No one has the right to demand that a person give his own life to save his neighbor. And this, alas, was precisely the price of saving the Jews. It was necessary to prepare in advance not only for one’s own death, but also for the death of one’s entire family. But many Poles chose exactly this path.

We will end our reflections on this problem with the words of the outstanding Polish writer Andrzejewski: “For all honest Poles, the fate of the dying Jews was especially painful, because people died whom our people did not have the right to look into the eyes directly and with a clear conscience. The Polish people could boldly look into the eyes of the Polish women and Poles dying for freedom. Jews dying in a burning ghetto - no!”

However, contrary to this statement, let’s try to face the truth and find a reason for optimism in the scraps of history of those years. In all occupied countries, individual citizens rushed to the aid of Jews. But only in Poland did this assistance become centralized, covering the entire country. Someone will ask: why did this happen so late? Most likely, because then no one could foresee that the genocide would acquire proportions unprecedented in history.

We have already discussed above the creation in 1942 of a department for the Jewish question and a temporary committee for assistance to Jews named after Konrad Žegota. On December 4, 1942, with the cooperation of political parties, the government representative established the Council for Assistance to Jews “Zhegota”. The head of the “Jewish department,” Witold Bienkowski, was elected as a delegate of the representative office to the Council.

The importance that the Polish representation in emigration attached to the Jewish question is evidenced by the notes made by Bienkowski in 1948: “As the head of the Żegota department, I received direct contact with the Office of Civil Struggle, the Finance Department, the Home Army General Staff, as well as with all information channels (radio, field mail, emissaries). This fact (the only case in the structure of our secret state administration) indicates a very serious attitude towards the problem of the Jews. While party leaders and senior officials waited for weeks for radio contact with London, during the Warsaw Uprising in the ghetto I was able to transmit news from the scene to London seven times a day. As for imposing death sentences on blackmailers, I was given special powers. With my own hand, I signed 117 death sentences, of which 89 were carried out... The Žegota Department occupied an important position politically... The organization of the Department covered all structures involved in the “Jewish question”: politics (domestic and foreign), intelligence, social assistance.” .

The Council for Aid to Jews "Zhegota" had financial, housing, ideological, children's, clothing departments, as well as a provincial affairs, documentation and anti-blackmail department. In the spring of 1943, the activities of the Council were organized in Krakow and Lviv, as well as in Radom, Jedrzejewo, Czestochowa, Skarzyska Kamennaya, Piotrkow Trybunalski, Tarnov, Przemysl, Sanok, Lublin, Zamosc and other cities.

Based on the story of the head of finance of “Zhegota” F. Archinsky, we will outline, as an example, the scope of action of some of his departments. The ideology department, through a network of correspondents, received information about the extermination of Jews, about Jews who had fled and were hiding, their needs and well-being. Bulletins were published and received by the authorities, political parties and the underground press. 1943 three pamphlets with a circulation of 25,000 were published, and another in German, under the guise of a publication of the German Resistance movement; pamphlets were distributed among the Germans and in their institutions. The pamphlets described the scale of Nazi crimes and called on the public to help the dying Jews. The brochure “A Year in Treblinka” was published in a circulation of 2,000 copies, and the collection of poetry “From the Abyss” was published in a circulation of 3,000. Both brochures were distributed not only in the country, but were also sent to the West.

The reports sent abroad were supposed to inform the public in the West and cause special reprisals against Germany from the Allies. But all efforts were in vain. For example, one of the dispatches sent during the liquidation of the ghetto contained a call for revenge for the murders of Jews. The explanation received was as follows: “the air forces of the N military unit are not called upon to carry out acts of revenge, but are called upon to carry out exclusively combat missions.”

The children's department of Žegota cared for a thousand or more Jewish children and adolescents.

It is believed that Žegota patronized more than 20,000 Jews. In Warsaw and its environs, the documentation department issued false documents to all Jewish wards, including birth certificates, death certificates, church wedding certificates, registration certificates, etc. On average, about 100 personalized documents were issued per day. Moreover, this department served local branches of the Council throughout the country in Warsaw, issuing “blind” documents, that is, forms without names and surnames, which were entered locally. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, in 1944, 50,000 documents were produced, of which 80% were for Jews in hiding.

The financial department received subsidies from the representative office from funds sent by the government from London. Here are just a few general data.

During the two years of Żegota's activity, 90% of the expenses were borne by the Polish authorities, and 10% by Jewish organizations abroad. Polish paratroopers (“silent ones”) delivered $420,000, equivalent to 30,000,000 occupation zlotys, for the needs of the Bund from October 1942 to August 1944. Available evidence suggests that financial aid from Western Jews began to arrive in greater quantities when there were few Polish Jews left alive. the treasure of the representation was very significant. At the same time, the representative office had huge expenses for various purposes (including military ones), while financial subsidies from the Polish government in London were limited, since it itself waged a war with the Germans with money received mainly from the allies on credit . This is the truth about some forms of assistance provided to Jews. However, there remain entire areas that have not yet been and, it seems, will never be explored, since the darkness of oblivion has covered many events, and there are fewer and fewer living witnesses.

Who today can establish the exact number of Jews saved by the Poles, or say how many Poles died giving them shelter or food? Witnesses confirm that there was not a day in the Warsaw ghetto when at least several “smugglers” delivering food into the ghetto were not shot. It must be remembered that from March 1941, the Nazis excluded Jews from the Arshava city goods system. Nevertheless, the Poles delivered more than 250 tons of food per day to the ghetto, and this at a time when famine reigned in most Polish cities (including Lviv and Warsaw).

It should also be emphasized that before the action of the Lublin Gestapo under the leadership of Hoffle, i.e. until September 13, 1942, mainly thanks to the Poles, the workshops working in the ghetto had raw materials and could sell their products, i.e. the Jews had Job. What can we say about the assistance with weapons, thanks to which a handful of ghetto defenders were able to hold out for quite a long time in the fight against the well-armed and highly experienced Nazis!

Is it possible to count how many Polish families hid Jews in their homes, without any outside help, because few people had the opportunity to contact the clandestine Resistance organizations or “Zhegota”. Can anyone who did not survive the occupation imagine how a family hiding Jews provided themselves with food, fearing the increased volume of purchases would attract the attention of others?

In addition, it happened that a person hiding without permission, without the knowledge of the “guardian,” temporarily left his shelter, as was the case, for example, in Ossow near Warsaw with Zelenkiewicz’s “ward” Jew Shapiro, who, having been caught, led the Gestapo to his shelter. Miraculously, only Shapiro’s wife and son escaped death: they managed to escape, but Zelenkevich was executed. Under similar circumstances, the priests of the Pauline Order in Lvov died.

Rumors about these events exacerbated the feeling of anxiety and danger. Today it is very difficult to put oneself in the shoes of those whom the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem calls “Righteous Among the Nations.” And it’s not for nothing that such an honorable title is given only to a few.

In 1941, only one of the occupied countries - Poland - faced the death penalty for providing not only shelter, but also food to a Jew. Not a single Belgian or Frenchman died for this “crime” in the West. To imagine the picture of the reign of terror in Poland, let us describe some of the tragedies that occurred then.

As reports from the Main Commission for the Study of Hitler's Crimes in Poland in 1968 show, 343 Poles died for helping Jews, of which 243 victims were identified, among them 64 women and 42 children. These figures are greatly underestimated; based on the results of new research, we can talk about more than 900 Poles who died for providing assistance to Jews, which is confirmed by the Jewish Historical Institute.

In three parts of the book Those who help (“Those who who saved"), published in 1993, 1996, 1997, not only lists the names of those awarded in Jerusalem. There is a list of names of 704 Poles executed by the Nazis for helping Jews during World War II. This list has not yet been completed; research is ongoing.

The Pope canonized Father Maximilian Kolbe for saving Jews in Auschwitz. For such actions, many Poles were executed, who showed no less heroism. But few Poles (and Jews) remember them, much less their orphaned families.

Here are some examples of such heroism: on December 6, 1942, in the village of Czepielowo-Stare (Kelecke Voivodeship), for hiding Jews, the SS department burned three Polish families in their houses (23 people in total, 15 of them children). In Warsaw, two families from Gruecka Street – the Marczaks and the Ołskis – were killed in a similar manner. They were members of Żegota and provided shelter to more than thirty Jews, including Dr. E. Ringelblum (1900–1944), a historian of the Warsaw ghetto who escaped from a concentration camp. On March 7, 1944, everyone who was in the apartment - both Poles and Jews - was shot. In the village of Erhowiska near Lublin, Joseph of Ardzinsky hid a group of local Jews on his farm. While checking the buildings, the Nazis found Jews and shot them. During the shootout (the Jews defended themselves while there was enough ammunition), the owner managed to escape. He hid in the forest along with the surviving Jews and the Russians who had escaped from captivity. During the raid in the Minkovice forest, all but two people died. Ardzinsky died on July 9, 1943, he was shot in the tree where he was hiding. In the village of Karczmiska (Lublin Voivodeship), S. Ishnevskaya and her 12-year-old sister Sofia, as well as the family of S. Marciniak, whose farm was burned, died for helping Jews. In Naftalina (Jastkov district), together with the hiding Jew Naftali Bruter, S. Kasiora was shot, and in Tomaszowice the Petrak and Ismul families were executed for helping Jews. On December 10, 1942, Ladislav Abramek, Joseph Aftyka (54 years old), Anelya (52 years old), Marianna (14 years old), Sofia (17 years old) died in Oli Przybyslawska (Lublin Voivodeship). These examples clearly illustrate the degree of dedication of those unrecognized heroes.

The Righteous Among the Nations medal, which the Institute of People's Memory (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem) awards to those who saved Jews, is indirect evidence of the attitude of the occupied peoples towards the persecuted Jews. These medals are not awarded posthumously, nor are they awarded to those who do not apply for them themselves. Many of those still living remain nameless heroes, not seeking any rewards. How many of them have already died? The greatest reward for them is a clear conscience and consciousness of a duty performed to the end.

From the documents, as well as from a comparison of the number of awardees from different countries, it follows that the Poles make up the largest group (if we correlate the number of awardees with the population, the Dutch are in first place).

But it's not about the numbers. The significance of these data, unfortunately, is underestimated by those who should remember them and many other facts of the more than 800-year history of the presence of Jews in Poland.

A separate topic is the gratitude of those saved to their benefactors, and not everything has been done here. The famous Jewish poet Chaim Hefer invites us to think about this in his poem “The Righteous Among the Nations.”

...At the sound of these words - their saviors
I remembered and was overwhelmed by severe doubt:
If only a whirlwind of that hatred roared around, -
Would I be able to hide strangers under my stepfather's roof?

At risk, at mortal fear - I would doom my family,
And the soul - to discord, to the darkness of sleepless nights?
I would be able to curb both my thoughts and my speech
In front of everyone around - in greetings, in bows?

Like this - hour after hour, like this - year after year,
Fearing the informers, I would be able to shiver -
For the grateful glance that only flashes at the end,
For words of warmth, for a moment of handshake?

There is no price for good. There are no rewards for loyalty.
And it’s a small honor to give away the surplus to others.
Only on the worst day will you see who your brother is,
Having learned firsthand about sincere love.

And again I search and find the answer:
I wish I could become like this, not in words, but in deeds!
After all, for me to survive, for me to see the light of the sun, -
They despised death and looked it in the eye.

For your courage in a dark hour, for your highest talent -
For the fervor of the soul - bow to you, sincere brothers.
O you, who do not let the sky fall like Atlas,
O Righteous One! I want to give you praise!

The nightmare experienced during the occupation instilled in the consciousness of peoples, including the Poles, a desire for peace, security and stability. However, the current situation in the country has postponed these prospects for several years. This happened as a result of changes in the social system. The far-left forces, which, at the behest of Moscow, took power in the country, liquidated the existing structures of the underground state. They filled the prisons with tens of thousands of former Home Army soldiers, and the repressive authorities of the USSR deported tens of thousands more to Siberia. During this time, many irreparable mistakes were made in national policy, including in relation to the Jews.

In the struggle for power, the opposing forces tried to play on anti-Semitism, especially since Hitler’s policies and propaganda left traces in the minds of some citizens.

In such circumstances, it was not difficult to incite the crowd into anti-Jewish protests and even pogroms. Such pogroms took place in Krakow (August 11, 1945), Rzeszow (July 4, 1946), and Kielce (on the same day). 40 Jews were killed. The reason for the last pogrom, according to one version, was the deliberate hiding in the basement of eight-year-old Henryk Blasik; according to another, his father allegedly sent him to the village. The boy was told to say that the Jews kept him in the cellar of a house on the street. Planty 7, in Kielce. As the state press agency later reported, the instigators, dressed in the uniforms of the army of General Anders (the Polish army in the West), allegedly shouted: “Beat the Jews! Long live the government in exile! Long live the Leader!

Rabbi D. Kagan estimates the number of people who participated in this pogrom at 2,000 and describes the entire event as follows: “The Jews locked themselves in the house and were ready to defend their lives with the weapons they had. At 12 o'clock a group of armed policemen arrived under the command of a sergeant. Blahut... who ordered him to hand over his weapons... and go out into the yard. When the Jews refused to obey, Blakhut began hitting them on the head with the butt of a pistol, shouting... The investigation established that Blakhut was the only policeman sent from the police department, and his assistants were “murderers from the crowd.”

Anyone familiar with this case will ask in surprise what the local and central authorities did, to whom this event was, of course, reported? Is it possible that in a voivodeship city with a large garrison of troops, police, and security services, during unrest, only the policeman Blahut acted in this way? The “case” launched against the alleged perpetrators of the events looked more like a farce (like other similar trials of those dark times).

The Catholic Church in the Krakow newspaper “General Weekly” condemned both the Kielce pogrom and anti-Semitism in general. A week after these events, on July 11, 1946, Archbishop Primate Hland, condemning the pogrom, concluded his statement with these words: “The Poles, themselves exterminated, supported the Jews, sheltered them and saved them at the risk of their own lives. Many Jews in Poland owe their lives to Poles, Polish priests. The responsibility for the change in this kind attitude towards Jews falls largely on those Jews who today occupy leading government positions in Poland and seek to impose on Poland a social system that the vast majority of the people do not want. This is a dangerous game that leads to tension. In these clashes in the political struggle, unfortunately, Jews die, but many Poles also die.”

Historian Kristina Kersten in the weekly Solidarity (1981, no. 36) in the article “Kielce, July 4, 1946” claims that this provocation was the work of the special services and remains an unsolved secret of the then PPR authorities. This opinion is also shared by Michal Chęcinski in his book. Professor I. Gutman from Jerusalem comments on this hypothesis as follows: “The author, familiar with the activities of the secret services from the inside, sees most political events in Poland after the war as a consequence of the intervention of these services. The Kielce pogrom is also connected with the secret services...”

At the same time, rumors spread that this provocation was organized by the Zionists (Bricha agents) in order to hasten Polish Jews to emigrate to Israel as part of the Aliyah Bet campaign. There is no need to justify the absurdity of such an opinion.

Other events that resonate with pain in the heart are the killings of Jews by Poles after 1944. I. Gutman in his book, referring to the “internal circular of the Polish government,” claims that by the end of 1945, 341 Jews were killed in Poland. He estimates the number of Jews killed by the summer of 1947 at approximately 1,000 people. For a reason known only to him, he uses the “approximate” method of calculation, although at that time the bureau for recording population movements was already clearly operating and the authorities were registering all cases that could be used in the fight against political opponents. Gutman makes another dubious argument.

In a conversation with journalists who came with Hoover (former US President), Polish President Boleslaw Bierut said that “it is not possible to establish an exact figure, but during the year several hundred Jews were killed by remnants of anti-Semitic organizations that are illegal in Poland.” Under normal conditions, even such an approximate figure, reported by a high-ranking statesman, would have been significant, but not in the Poland of that time, and moreover, expressed for political purposes by such a controversial figure as Boleslaw Bierut, called the Polish Stalin. The PUWP stated at its congress in 1989 that “Bolesław Bierut... instigated numerous trials and harsh sentences. On his initiative, unfounded arrests and falsified charges were carried out against groups of leading figures of the PRP...”

A scholar of Professor Gutman's stature should know how often Jewish blood was used for political purposes. Therefore, one should not draw final conclusions based on such “evidence.”

There are objective difficulties in determining the actual number of Polish Jews who escaped extermination by the Nazis. Many thousands of them, for various reasons, mostly personal, were still in the USSR. A significant part at the end of the war ended up in concentration camps in Germany and never returned to the country. Many of those who survived the occupation with the help of "Aryan papers" (passports) broke with Judaism and either went to the West or assimilated within the country. Both of them did not come into contact with Jewish communities. Jewish collaborators, who wanted to quickly leave for the West, also did not register in the communities. The data received from branches of Jewish organizations in Poland is approximate and does not definitively answer the question of who, when and how was saved. The results of research conducted by Poles are incomplete and contradictory.

As of October 10, 1944, the sector for assistance to the Jewish population under the Committee of National Liberation registered only 8,000 Jews in Lublin and other settlements in that part of the voivodeships that were liberated by the Red Army. On November 4, 1944, the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKEP) was created. In July 1946, 244,964 Jews already lived in Poland, including from February to June 1946, on the basis of the repatriation agreement between Poland and the USSR, 136,550 people were repatriated. Another 108,000 are Jews who either survived the occupation or, by February 1946, found themselves in Poland as a result of illegal repatriation from Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. According to the Presidium of the CCJP, in 1945, about 40,000 Jews managed to get into Poland in this way.

In the 1920s, when England restricted the entry of Jews into Palestine, “Aliyah Bet” (“second aliyah,” i.e., illegal) was proclaimed to support illegal immigration. There were also “aliyah gimel” and “dalet” (from the following letters of the Hebrew alphabet) - emigration using fake IDs or through their repeated use by different persons. In the 1930s, Aliya Bet smuggled emigrants mainly from Germany and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. To do this, she created underground groups called “Bricha” (Hebrew “flight”, “unexpected departure” to Eretz Israel - “land of Israel”).

Already in November 1945, Brikha agents organized the illegal emigration of Jews from Poland. Since February 1946, they transported more than 10,000 Jews by truck. Along with repatriation from the USSR, the “great aliyah” also began, especially after the arrival of the last trains of repatriated people (June–July 1946) and after the Kielce pogrom that took place at that time. Of the quarter million Jews, by the spring of 1947 only 100,000 remained in Poland.

During the repatriation of Germans from Szczecin to the English zone, "Bricha" added to their trains carriages with Jews (about 700 people) who had forged documents, from which it followed that they were citizens of the former Third Reich. In the refugee camps in Germany there were over 200,000 Jews (most from Poland) waiting there for the “opening of the gates of Palestine.”

The difficulties that the mandate authorities created for Jews trying to reach Palestine after the horrific experiences of the war years should be described separately. A striking example is the fate of the passengers of the ship St. Louis, which the British returned to Hamburg.

After the UN decision to partition Palestine, the Zionists launched the “Fund for Relief to Struggling Palestine” campaign. All Jewish organizations active in Poland, including the communist Jewish faction of the Polish Workers' Party, had raised almost 113,000,000 zlotys for this Fund by September 1948. In addition, volunteers were recruited into the Haganah, who, after retraining with legal passports, were sent to Palestine. For this purpose, a military training camp was created in Bolkovo near Zielona Gora. As a result of the campaign to recruit and train volunteers for the Haganah, about 3,200 Jews ended up in it.

In November 1945, the Gechalutz (Pioneer) organization, with its center in Warsaw, resumed its activities. 1948 Kibbutzim in Lower Silesia, in which over 2,000 Halutzians were concentrated, received an allowance from the government in the amount of about 40,000,000 zlotys. They prepared Jewish youth for the upcoming work and struggle in Palestine.

In 1944–1956 in People's Poland, Jews had free access to the highest political, administrative and economic positions. A Jewish minister, general, governor, judge, prosecutor, police chief, head of the Security Committee, and director were not uncommon. More than a dozen Jewish organizations, including Zionist ones, operated legally. During these years, more than 12 Jewish newspapers were published.

In January 1949, the US government recognized the de jure state of Israel and provided it with a $1,000,000,000 loan. Hopes for the formation of a “Jewish Soviet Republic” in Palestine were dashed; Israel did not become a “socialist island in the capitalist world.” In the 1949 elections to the Knesset, which consisted of 120 deputies, the Israeli Communist Party received 4 mandates. But this did not stop the Polish authorities from issuing 40,000 passports for emigration to Israel. Until 1950, several tens of thousands more Jews emigrated from Poland legally and illegally.

At the turning point of 1949/50. The CKEP and its local committees were recognized as nationalist and turned into the “Socio-Cultural Society of the Jews” (OCOE). At the same time, by order of the Minister of Public Administration of December 13, 1949, the deadlines for the liquidation of all Zionist parties and organizations were determined.

The last tragedy of Jews in post-war Poland occurred in 1968, after the March student protests. The reason was the six-day Israeli-Arab war and the associated severance of diplomatic relations with Israel by the entire communist bloc (with the exception of Romania) and the growth of anti-Semitism in these countries, which took the form of a struggle against “Zionism and cosmopolitanism.”

To justify the anti-Semitic campaign, the authorities referred to the fact that many Jews in the country then took a critical position in relation to the policies of the Polish government, that they demonstratively expressed support for “Israeli aggression against Arab countries”, that there were emigrants from Poland even in the highest positions in the Israeli army , including officers.

As already mentioned, the reason for the crackdown on Zionism was mass student protests. On March 8, 1968, a peaceful meeting of students at the University of Warsaw was dispersed by police and support services. This marked the beginning of rallies and strikes in almost all universities, which were also suppressed by force. Propaganda pointed out that the student organizers of these events came from the families of certain influential people, especially those of Jewish origin, who had by that time lost their socio-political positions.

Here is how, 20 years later, the organ of the Central Committee of the party “Tribuna Ludu” dated March 2, 1986 illuminates the background of these events: “in the late 40s - early 50s there were many leading positions in the party and in the army, in the institutions of the ideological front, in the state administration, including punitive agencies, were occupied by citizens of Jewish origin. The memory of the lawlessness of those years, of violations of the law and of the perpetrators of those actions has been preserved in the consciousness of the Polish public. On this basis, it was easy to accept in 1968 the statement that “a group alien to the Polish people was the source of all evil.” In his speech on June 19, 1967, Secretary of the Party Central Committee Gomułka even used the expression “5th column.” But on his own initiative, on June 24, 1968, it was forbidden to emphasize in the press the topic of Zionism and the Jewish origin of the participants in the March events. As a result, there was a settling of personal scores, a division of people according to their origin. Many even honored Jews were removed from various areas of life, regardless of their political position.”

On this wave in 1968–1971. About 13,000 Jews left Poland. Today the Jewish community numbers several thousand people.

In thinking about the Jewish question, one cannot ignore the situation of Soviet Jews. Today we can talk about circumstances that until recently were surrounded by a wall of silence. However, this book does not provide sufficient coverage of the problem of Jews in the USSR. Therefore, we will focus on several issues. One of them is the position of the Jews in a system for which some of them developed a theoretical justification, while others actively contributed to its implementation. In 1920, out of 22 people's commissars, 17 were Jews. Of the 43 members of the military commissariat, 33 are Jews. in other commissariats they made up from 80 to 100% of the members.

Paul Johnson, in A History of the Jews, comments on this situation: “Immediately before, during, and after the First World War, “non-Jewish” Jews were significant figures in every revolutionary party and in every European country. They played a major role in the uprisings that occurred after the defeat of Germany and Austria. Bela Kun (1886–1939) was the dictator of the communist regime that came to power in Hungary from March to August 1919. Kurt Eisner (1867–1919) led the revolutionary uprising in Bavaria in November 1918 and led the republic for 4 months, until killed. The murder of Rosa Luxemburg, the former "brains" of the revolutionary Berlin group Spartacus, occurred a few weeks before Eisner's murder.

But the most striking and revealing example of the identification of some Jews with revolutionary violence was Russia. The strategist of the coup that gave power to the Bolsheviks in October 1917 was a non-Jew, Lenin. But the performer was Lev Davidovich Trotsky (Bronstein). His father was a Ukrainian peasant or, as wealthy peasants were later called, a “kulak”; Trotsky himself was a “fruit” of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Odessa (he went to a Lutheran school). Trotsky argued that neither Judaism nor anti-Semitism influenced the development of his personality. But this is not true. there was something unnatural, close to hatred, in his attacks on the Jewish Bundists at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in London in 1903. These attacks caused the Bundists to leave the meeting, as a result of which the Bolsheviks won. Trotsky called Herzl a “shameless brawler,” a “dubious type.” Like Rosa Luxemburg, he did not want to notice the suffering of the Jews. While Trotsky was in power, he constantly refused to receive Jewish delegations. Like other "non-Jewish" Jews, he suppressed his feelings for his own family, as required by his political position. He was not interested in the misfortunes of his own father, who lost everything during the revolution and later died of typhus.

Trotsky's unrealized sense of belonging to his own nation transformed into the ruthless, volcanic energy of a revolutionary. It is unlikely that without him the Bolshevik revolution could have won and survived. It was Trotsky who pointed out to Lenin the importance of workers' councils and taught him to use them. It was Trotsky who organized and led the armed uprising that overthrew the provincial government and gave power to the Bolsheviks. It was Trotsky who formed the Red Army and led it until 1925; he helped physically withstand the communist regime during the Civil War. Trotsky, more than anyone, embodied the violence and demonic power of Bolshevism in his intention to “set the whole world on fire.” And more than anyone is responsible for the widespread identification of the revolution with the Jews.

For Jews, the consequences—immediate and long-term, locally and globally—are tragic. The troops of the White Army, in an effort to deal with the Bolshevik regime, considered all Jews enemies. In Ukraine, the civil war degenerated into the largest pogrom in Jewish history. More than a thousand individual murders of Jews have been recorded, and the persecution, during which between 60 and 70 thousand Jews were killed, affected more than 700 Jewish communities in Ukraine and several hundred in Russia.

In Eastern European countries, the identification of Jews with the Bolsheviks led to criminal attacks on Jewish communities. The persecution of Jews was especially bloody in Poland after the Bolshevik invasion and in Hungary after the fall of the Bela Kun regime. The persecution of Jews continued for 10 years (1920–1930). In all these countries, communist parties were most often created and headed by “non-Jewish” Jews, and traditional Jewish believers from ghettos and shtetls, not connected with politics, paid for it.

The tragic irony is that ordinary Jews did not benefit from the revolution; on the contrary, their situation worsened greatly. Kerensky's temporary government recognized all civil rights for Jews, including the right to organize their own political parties and cultural institutions. In Ukraine, Jews became part of the government; the Jew headed the special Ministry of Jewish Affairs. In Lithuania, which the Bolsheviks failed to occupy until 1940, guarantees for national minorities were effective, and the position of the Jewish community between the First and Second World Wars was the best in all of Eastern Europe. For Jews, the Bolshevik coup turned back the clock of history, and the Bolshevik regime became a disaster. At first, Lenin and his supporters equated anti-Semitism with counter-revolution. The Council of People's Commissars, in a decree of July 27, 1918, ordered "all councils of workers', peasants' and soldiers' deputies to take steps that would lead to the destruction of the anti-Semitic movement and its roots." The government published Lenin's speech condemning anti-Semitism. These half-hearted efforts were overshadowed by Lenin's furious attack on the “exploiters” and “democrats,” which referred to the Jews and was understood in precisely this sense - as an attack on the Jews. A regime based on the ideas of Marxism, which in turn was based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, a regime that began its activities by declaring entire social groups “enemies of the people” and then persecuting it, was inevitably created around the Jews atmosphere of hostility. Jewish merchants were among the first victims of Lenin's policy of terror directed against "anti-social groups"; many were “liquidated”; some (about 300,000) fled to Poland, the Baltic countries, Turkey and the Balkans.

It is also true, however, that Jews made up a significant percentage of the leadership of the Communist Party (as well as its ordinary members). At party congresses, 15–20% of delegates were of Jewish origin. But these were “non-Jewish” Jews. The Bolshevik Party was the only party in the post-Tsarist period that was hostile to Jews. Ordinary Jews only suffered because of Jewish activity on the political stage. Jewish Bolsheviks made up a significant number of Cheka commissioners, tax inspectors, and bureaucrats. They played leading roles in the expeditions organized by Lenin and Trotsky that took grain from the peasants. For all this, Jews were hated. And, as has happened more than once in the history of the Jewish people, they were persecuted for completely opposite reasons. On the one hand, the Jews were “anti-social elements”; on the other, they were Bolsheviks. The only Soviet archive whose contents were known in the West, concerning the situation in Smolensk in 1917–1938, shows that peasants often identified the Bolshevik dictatorship with Jewish intermediaries. 1922, the peasants threatened: if the commissars take the gold jewelry out of the church, then “not a single Jew will survive, we will kill them all in one night.” Crowds shouted in the streets: “Beat the Jews, save Russia!” 1926 Accusations of ritual murders reappeared. However, the archive shows that the Jews were afraid of the regime: “They are afraid of the police, as they once were afraid of the tsarist gendarme.”

The Jews' fears were well founded. In August 1919, all Jewish religious communities were liquidated, their property was confiscated and most synagogues were closed. The teaching of the Hebrew language and the publication of non-religious works in it were prohibited. It was possible to print in Yiddish, but only in phonetic transcription (Yiddish culture was allowed, although it was under constant surveillance). The functions of supervision were performed by special Jewish departments (Evsections), organized in the cells of the Communist Party of “non-Jewish” Jews, the important function of which was to register signs of “Jewish cultural particularism.” The Bund was destroyed and the persecution of Russian Zionists began. By 1917 it was the strongest political movement among Russian Jews, with 300,000 members and 1,200 branches. Numerically, this movement was much stronger than Bolshevism. Since 1919, the Yevsektsiya began an offensive against the Zionists, using for this purpose the cells of the Cheka, headed by “non-Jewish” Jews. In St. Petersburg, the main headquarters of the Zionists was occupied, the staff was arrested and the newspaper was closed. The same thing happened in Moscow. In April 1920, the All-Russian Zionist Congress was interrupted by the invasion of a branch of the Cheka, led by a young Jewish woman. Seventy-five delegates were arrested. Beginning in 1920, thousands of Zionists were sent to camps, from which few returned. On August 26, 1922, it was stated that the Zionist Party “under the guise of democracy seeks to corrupt Jewish youth and push them into the arms of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie in the interests of Anglo-French capital. Representatives of the Jewish bourgeoisie, seeking to restore the Palestinian state, are supported by reactionary forces, including such rabid imperialists as Poincaré, Lloyd George and the Pope."

Pressure on Jews increased with Stalin's rise to power. At the end of the 1920s, all “Jewish” forms of activity were destroyed or deprived of their authenticity. In this situation, Stalin liquidated the Yevsektsii, leaving the supervision of the secret services. Jews were removed from almost all internal party positions. Anti-Semitism became a significant party force. “Is it true,” Trotsky wrote to Bukharin on March 4, 1926, “is it possible that anti-Semitic propaganda can be carried out with impunity in our party in Moscow?” Alas, this campaign was not only carried out with impunity, but was also encouraged. Jews, especially party members, made up a disproportionate number of Stalin's victims.

One of them was Isaac Babel (1894–1940?), probably the only great Jewish writer whom the Russian Revolution gave the world. His tragedy is a kind of parable about Jews under Soviet rule. Like Trotsky, he was raised in Odessa, where Babel’s father kept a shop. He, like Trotsky, wanted to become a “non-Jewish” Jew. He fought in the tsarist army, and when the revolution began, he served in the Cheka and, as a Bolshevik activist, plundered peasant farms. In a place with the Cossacks, he fought in the First Cavalry under the leadership of SM. Budyonny. The events he experienced formed the basis of Babel’s masterpiece - a collection of short stories “Cavalry” (1926), in which he was able to convey the breath of a terrible time, the stages of the revolution, steps towards achieving, as he put it, “the simplest form of high art, the ability to kill one’s neighbor " The idea of ​​becoming a “non-Jewish” Jew turned out to be unrealistic. For Stalin, Babel was a Jew like the rest. Stalin's Russia, from the honorable heights, Babel slipped into hell. At a writers' congress in 1934, he made a mysterious speech full of irony. He said that the party, in its boundless kindness, deprives writers of only one freedom: the freedom to write badly. The writer noted that he himself writes in a new literary genre, becoming “a model of silence.” “I respect the reader so much,” he added, “that I cannot squeeze out a word.” Babel was soon arrested and disappeared (probably shot).

The world did not know that in Soviet Russia anti-Semitism had revived in a new form, that all Jewish organizations had been destroyed, that the very lives of Jews were under threat. The implication was that since the Jews were the leaders of the revolution, they benefited the most. No distinction was made between traditionalist, reformist, or Zionist Jews and that group of “non-Jewish” Jews who actually participated in the establishment of the “revolutionary order.” This is not surprising, because one of the theses of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is this: the apparent conflict of interests between Jews is just a cover for achieving common goals. The most common anti-Semitic slander is that behind the scenes there are always signs of Jewish cooperation. The barbarism of the Bolsheviks intensified anti-Semitic sentiments in different countries.

French anti-Semitism, previously focused on Jewish financial power, now switched to Jews - social “saboteurs”. Jewish socialists (such as their leader and theorist Leon Blum) took pride in the messianic role of Jewish revolutionaries. “The collective impulse of the Jews,” wrote L. Blum, “leads to revolution; their criticism (I use this word in the most exalted sense) inclines them to reject any idea, any traditional form, which does not agree with the facts or cannot be justified by the intellect. The Jews, throughout their long and sad history, were strengthened by the hope of “imminent justice,” they were convinced that one fine day the world would be governed according to reason; one law will be established for everyone, so that everyone will receive what they deserve. Isn't this in the spirit of socialism? from the primordial spirit of this race." Bloom wrote this in 1901. After the end of the First World War, these words became even more dangerous. However, Blum persistently repeated that the goal of the Jews was to be in the vanguard of the socialist movement. He was apparently convinced that rich Jews would also take part in this march. And although the French right wing considered Blum the embodiment of Jewish radicalism, many representatives of leftist groups attacked him as a secret agent of the Jewish bourgeoisie. A third of French bankers were Jews, and the left was happy to repeat that Jews controlled government finances, no matter who was in power. Jean Jaurès argued that "their long association with banking and trade developed in them a great capacity for capitalist crime." In the post-war years, when the party of the left became the "Communist Mistress of France", anti-Semitism - although subtle - was part of the repertoire of insults against Blum. But Blum and other French Jewish leaders persistently underestimated French anti-Semitism on both the right and left wings.

The most important consequences of the Bolsheviks coming to power and the active participation of radical Jews in establishing a new order manifested themselves in the United States. about France, although Jews were under attack from both the right and the left, Jewish refugees were still accepted in the 20s and even 30s. In America, fear of the Bolsheviks led to the end of the policy of immigration without restrictions, which saved European Jews from 1881 to 1914. Even before the war, there were attempts to limit immigration, but the American Jewish Committee, organized in 1906 to combat such threats, resisted this successfully. However, along with the war, the ultra-liberal phase of the expansion of democracy in America ended and a ten-year period of xenophobia began. 1906 The Ku Klux Klan was reactivated to control minority groups (including Jews) who were said to be a threat to American moral and social norms. Madison Grant's book was published that same year. Tha Passing of Graat Raca. It argued that America's racial superiority was disappearing due to mass immigration, in which Jews played a significant role. Later, the “Decree on Espionage” (1917) and the “Decree on the Threat of Betrayal” (1918) were issued, which led to the identification of foreigners with traitors.

The atmosphere became extremely tense after the Bolshevik victory in Russia. The result was the Red Scare of 1919–1920, an action led by Attorney General Matchel Palmer against what he called “foreign saboteurs and agitators.” He claimed that there were "60,000 of these organized agitators of the Trotsky Doctrine" in the United States. And Trotsky himself was “a contemptible immigrant... the worst type known in New York.” Many of the materials published by Palmer and his followers were anti-Semitic in nature. one of the leaflets said that of the 31st Soviet leaders, all except Lenin were Jews. Another analyzed the composition of the Petrograd Council, pointing out that only 16 of the 380 Council members were Russians, and the rest were Jews, of whom 265 came from New York's East Side. The third document proved that the decision to overthrow tsarism was actually made on February 14, 1916 by a group of New York Jews, which included millionaire Jacob Schiff.

The Immigration Statute (1921) was passed, according to which the annual number of immigrants could not exceed 3 % population of this ethnic group in the United States in 1910. The Johnson-Reed Amendment of 1924 reduced this number to 2%, and the base data year was 1890. The result of this was a decrease in the total number of immigrants to 154,000 per year and a decrease in the amount earmarked for immigration Polish, Russian, Romanian. This most clearly affected the Jews, stopping their mass immigration to the United States. From that moment on, Jewish organizations had difficulty maintaining the allocated amounts (then they were canceled altogether). It is considered fortunate that in nine difficult years (1933–1941) it was possible to help 159,000 German Jews enter the country (almost the same number as immigrated Jews in 1906 alone).

Implementing Stalin's national policy, in 1928 the Jewish Autonomous Region with the capital Birobidzhan was formed in the Khabarovsk Territory on the Bir River. In 1959, only 41,000 people of different nationalities lived there. In 1989, about 10,000 Jews lived in this territory, most of whom did not know the language, history and culture of their fathers, not to mention the Law of Moses. Until recently, only one synagogue operated there. All this indicates the failure of the Stalinist experiment (in Moscow alone in the late 80s, about 100,000 Jews lived, and in the entire USSR - about 2,000,000). This project of creating a national habitat for Jews, like previous ones - in Argentina, Madagascar, etc. - turned out to be an illusion. The only place that magnetically attracts the ideological part of the Jewish people is Palestine, and now Israel, the best direction of their emigration and the best place to stay.

The second problem is anti-Semitism, which has not been eradicated in socialist states. Here it also manifested itself in the form of a struggle against “Zionists and cosmopolitans.” As we saw in Poland in March 1968, these campaigns are controlled from above and suppressed by order. During the Stalinist period, this was evident in the trumped-up trials of Reich in Hungary in 1949 or Slansky in Czechoslovakia in 1952. Jews devoted to Stalinist ideology were increasingly accused of treason. In 1952, the flower of Jewish culture in the USSR was liquidated. In addition, there is a known show trial of the Jewish elite of the medical world. Only the death of Stalin interrupted the preparation of the largest anti-Jewish act in the entire Eastern bloc.

The changes that took place in the country after 1985 led to an improvement in the situation of Jews in the states of the former USSR. 1989 The USSR Academy of Sciences invited Rabbi A. Steinsaltz from Jerusalem to Moscow to establish a center for the study of Judaism in the USSR. He gave a number of lectures in Moscow and Leningrad. Since 1990, an educational institution has been operating to train future rabbis. Jewish archives and the Israeli Cultural Center were opened, and S. Wiesenthal was given the opportunity to organize an anti-fascist exhibition in Moscow. These amazing, incredible changes are undoubtedly intoxicating for Soviet Jews. But will they be so attractive as to make them forget about the homeland of their forefathers - the land of Israel?

More than a hundred years have passed since the first pogroms in Russia. But even now there are forces there ready to persecute the Jews. Ladimir Soloukhin wrote in 1973: “Believe that their (Jewish) day is Yu. G.) eviction from our country is already close. And neither Sakharov... nor you, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, will be able to prevent this by any tricks! Drink our blood and that's enough! If they don’t leave voluntarily, we’ll help, we have a moral right to do this.”

These sinister voices are not alone. In personal contacts with individual Moscow dissidents, one could notice their negative attitude towards Jews. Each time they talked about how the Jew Lazar Kaganovich, and therefore all the Jews in his person, destroyed with twenty-two explosions a wonderful architectural monument - the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, erected by the Russian people in honor of the victory over Napoleon (“and over the Freemasons”)...

We have already noticed: as the situation of the Jews in the “northern countries” worsened, the borders of Western countries opened before them, but in the end the eternal wanderer ended up in his original place of residence - Israel. This pattern is still relevant today.

Anti-Semitism is a shameful phenomenon. Actually, any oppression, and especially the physical destruction of people based on nationality, is criminal, especially if it is initiated by the government and carried out on a national scale. History knows cases of mass genocide against representatives of different nations. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed by the Turks at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Not everyone knows how brutally Japanese soldiers dealt with the Chinese during the occupation of Nanjing and Singapore in the late 30s. Mass executions were carried out during the war by the allies of Nazi Germany, the Croatian Ustasha. By historical standards, recently, in 1994, terrible purges on ethnic grounds (Hutus killed Tutsis) shocked Rwanda.

But there is a people who were subjected to the most severe ethnic persecution in the twentieth century, called the Holocaust. Modern Germans cannot unambiguously explain why their grandfathers, who grew up under the influence of Goebbels’ propaganda, exterminated the Jews. It is possible that the ancestors themselves would not have found a clear argumentation for their actions, but in the thirties and forties, in most cases everything was clear and understandable to them.

Woe from mind?

When asked why Jews were exterminated in different countries (and this happened not only in Germany in the twentieth century, but also in other countries at different times), one can most often hear the answer from representatives of this people: “Out of envy!” This version of the assessment of tragic events has its own logic and truth. The Jewish people gave humanity many geniuses who shone in science, art, and other areas of human civilization. The ability to adapt, a traditionally active position, an active character, subtle and ironic humor, innate musicality, enterprise and other absolutely positive qualities are characteristic of the nation that gave the world Einstein, Oistrakh, Marx, Botvinnik... Yes, you can list for a long time who else. But, apparently, it’s not just a matter of envy of outstanding mental abilities. After all, not all Jews are Einsteins. There are simpler people among them. The sign of real wisdom is not its constant demonstration, but something else. For example, the ability to provide yourself with a friendly environment. Such that no one would even think of offending representatives of this people. And not out of fear, but out of respect. Or even love.

Revolutionary money grab

People of different nationalities strive for power and wealth. Anyone who truly wants to taste these attributes of earthly paradise looks for ways to achieve his goal and sometimes finds them. Then other people (who can be conventionally called envious people) have a desire to redistribute goods, in other words, to take away values ​​from the rich and appropriate them or, in extreme cases, divide them equally (or in a fraternal way, this is when the eldest has more). During pogroms and revolutions, successful owners of fortunes of different nationalities, from Zulu kings to Ukrainian top government officials, come under analysis. But why were the Jews exterminated first in almost all cases of mass robbery? Maybe they have more money?

Aliens and xenophobes

For historical reasons, Jews did not have their own state from ancient times until the mid-twentieth century. They had to settle in different countries, kingdoms, states and move to new places in search of a better life. Some of the Jews were able to assimilate, joining the indigenous ethnic group and dissolving into it without a trace. But the core of the nation still retained its identity, religion, language and other characteristics that define national characteristics. This in itself is a miracle, because xenophobia to one degree or another is inherent in almost all indigenous ethnic groups. Otherness causes rejection and hostility, and these, in turn, make life very difficult.

Knowing that a common enemy could be the best reason to unite a nation, Hitler exterminated the Jews. Technically it was simple, they were easy to recognize, they go to synagogues, keep kashrut and the Sabbath, dress differently and sometimes even speak with an accent. Moreover, at the time the Nazis came to power, Jews did not have the ability to effectively resist violence, representing an almost ideal ethnically isolated and helpless victim. The desire for self-isolation, which determined the survival of the nation, once again worked as a bait for pogromists.

"My Struggle" by Hitler

Did the Germans know about Auschwitz and Buchenwald?

After the defeat of Nazism, many Germans claimed that they knew nothing about concentration camps, ghettos, high-efficiency crematoria ovens and giant ditches filled with human bodies. They also did not know about soap, and candles made from human fat, and other cases of “useful disposal” of remains. Some of their neighbors simply disappeared somewhere, and the authorities did not reach them with information about the atrocities committed in the occupied territories. The desire to disclaim responsibility for war crimes among ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers and officers is understandable; they pointed to the SS troops, who were primarily engaged in punitive operations. But there was also Kristallnacht in 1938, during which not only stormtroopers in brown shirts acted, but also ordinary people. Representatives of the sentimental, talented and hardworking German people with sweet rapture destroyed the property of their recent friends and neighbors, and they themselves were beaten and humiliated. So why did the Germans exterminate the Jews, what were the reasons for the sudden outbreak of fierce hatred? Were there any reasons?

Jews of the Weimar Republic

To understand the reasons why the Germans, their recent neighbors and friends, exterminated the Jews, one should immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. Many historical studies have been written about this period, and those who do not want to read scientific tomes have the opportunity to learn about it from the novels of the great writer E.M. Remarque. The country suffers from unbearable indemnities imposed by the Entente countries that won the Great War. Poverty borders on hunger, while the souls of its citizens are increasingly possessed by various vices caused by forced idleness and the desire to somehow brighten up their drab, miserable life. But there are also successful people, businessmen, bankers, speculators. Entrepreneurship, due to centuries of nomadic life, is in the blood of Jews. It was they who became the backbone of the business elite of the Weimar Republic, which existed from 1919. There were, of course, poor Jews, artisans, working craftsmen, musicians and poets, artists and sculptors, and they made up the majority of the people. They basically became victims of the Holocaust, the rich managed to escape, they had money for tickets.

The Holocaust reached its peak during World War II. “Death factories”, Majdanek and Auschwitz, immediately began operating on the territory of occupied Poland. But the flywheel of mass murder based on nationality gained special momentum after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the USSR.

There were many Jews in the Leninist Politburo of the Bolshevik Party, they even made up the majority. By 1941, large-scale purges took place in the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, as a result of which the national composition of the Kremlin leadership underwent significant changes. But at the lower (as they say, “local”) levels and in the bodies of the NKVD, the Bolshevik Jews still maintained quantitative dominance. Many of them had experience of the Civil War, their services to the Soviet government were assessed as indisputable, they participated in other large-scale Bolshevik projects. Is it worth asking why Hitler exterminated Jews and commissars in the occupied Soviet territories in the first place? For the Nazis, these two concepts were almost identical and eventually merged into a single definition of “liquid commissar.”

Vaccine against anti-Semitism

National hostility was gradually instilled. Racial theory began to dominate almost immediately after the Nazis came to power. Chronicle footage of ritual sacrifices appeared on cinema screens, during which rabbis killed cows by cutting their throats with a sharp knife. and women can be very beautiful, but Nazi propagandists were not interested in such things. For propaganda videos and posters, “walking manuals for anti-Semites” were specially selected, with faces expressing brutal cruelty and stupidity. This is how the Germans became anti-Semitic.

After the Victory, the commandant's offices of the victorious countries pursued a policy of denazification, in all four occupation zones: Soviet, American, French and British. Residents of the defeated Reich were actually forced (under the threat of being deprived of food rations) to watch revealing documentaries. This measure was aimed at leveling the consequences of twelve years of brainwashing of the deceived Germans.

Same like that!

Talking about geopolitics, preaching the ideals of racial superiority of the Aryans and calling for the destruction of nations, the Fuhrer nevertheless remained, paradoxically, an ordinary person who suffered from a number of psychological complexes. One of them was the question of one's own nationality. Understanding why Hitler exterminated the Jews is difficult, but one clue may be the origins of his father, Alois Schicklgruber. The father of the future Fuhrer received the infamous surname only after an official declaration of paternity, certified by three witnesses and made by Johann Georg Hitler in 1867 for reasons of inheritance.

Alois himself was married three times, and there is a version that one of his children from a previous marriage tried to blackmail the “leader of the German people” with information about the half-Jewish origin of their common father. This hypothesis has a number of inconsistencies, but due to the chronological remoteness it cannot be completely excluded. But it can explain some of the subtleties of the sick psyche of the possessed Fuhrer. After all, an anti-Semitic Jew is not such a rare occurrence. And Hitler’s appearance does not at all correspond to the racial standards adopted in the Third Reich. He was not a tall, blue-eyed, blond man.

Occult and other reasons

One can try to explain why Hitler exterminated the Jews from the standpoint of the ethical and philosophical basis that he provided for the process of physical extermination of millions of people. The Fuhrer was fond of occult theories, and his favorite authors were Guido von List and In general, the version of the origin of the Aryans and ancient Germans turned out to be quite confused and contradictory, but with regard to the Jews, the policy was based on the mystical assumption that they, identified by Hitler as a separate race, supposedly represent danger to all humanity, threatening it with complete destruction.

It is difficult to imagine that an entire nation could be drawn into some kind of global conspiracy. With a multimillion-dollar population, someone would definitely spill the beans about the inhumane plan, in which everyone from the shoemaker Rabinovich to Professor Geller participates. There is no logical answer to the question of why the Nazis exterminated Jews.

Wars are committed when people refuse to think for themselves, relying on their leaders, and without a doubt, and sometimes with pleasure, carry out someone else's evil will. Unfortunately, similar phenomena still occur today...