The Holocaust

• 1. Introduction

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  The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Between late July and early November 1942, the biologist Lewi Stone calculated, around 1.47 million Jews were murdered across Europe in just 100 days. That pace is approximately 83 percent higher than the commonly suggested figure for the Rwandan genocide. Historian Alex J. Kay, who dates the peak from late July to mid-November, wrote that "these three-and-a-half months were the most intense, the deadliest of the entire Holocaust". It was probably the fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.

  Killing at that speed required more than hatred. It required trains, camps, bureaucrats, policemen, soldiers and neighbors, spread across a continent. This documentary asks how a modern state assembled such a machine, and which ideas and ambitions drove it. It asks who carried out the killing, who profited from it, and who refused. It asks how some people survived, and why historians still argue over when the final order was given. Finally, it asks what the word Holocaust itself carries, and why its meaning is still disputed.

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• 2. Words and Their Weight

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  The word holocaust comes from a Greek term meaning burnt offering. For centuries it was an ordinary English word for destruction or sacrifice by fire, and sometimes, figuratively, for a massacre. During the 1950s it began to harden into a proper noun. It became the most common name, in English and many other languages, for the Nazi extermination of the Jews. By the 1970s the adjective Jewish had been dropped as redundant, and the capitalized Holocaust became the default term.

  The Hebrew word Shoah means catastrophic destruction, and it refers exclusively to Jewish victims. The perpetrators had a name of their own, the Final Solution. It was a euphemism that hid a genocide behind the language of administration.

  Some writers stretch the term Holocaust to cover other groups the Nazis persecuted. The Roma and Sinti, who were targeted on a biological basis, are the clearest example. Soviet prisoners of war and Polish and Soviet civilians are sometimes added as well. Each of these groups, however, was targeted for different reasons. Historian Christian Gerlach estimates that further Nazi persecutions between 1933 and 1945 killed 6 to 8 million non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war, while an estimate by Gilbert exceeds 10 million. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents several million non-Jewish victims, primarily Soviet prisoners of war and ethnic Poles. Scholars Donald L. Niewyk and Francis R. Nicosia suggest that the broadest possible definition of the Holocaust could include as many as 17 million victims.

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• 3. Hatred Before Hitler

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  Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. Throughout the Middle Ages they faced antisemitism rooted in Christian theology, which blamed them for the killing of Jesus. In the 19th century many European countries granted Jews full citizenship, hoping they would assimilate. By the early 20th century most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society. In eastern Europe, where emancipation arrived later, many still lived in small towns, spoke Yiddish and practiced Orthodox Judaism.

  A newer hostility, political antisemitism, emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries. It grew alongside rising nationalism and an industrialization that sharpened economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews. It claimed that a Jewish question existed, and usually pointed to an international Jewish conspiracy. At the same time, some scientists began sorting humans into races and arguing that a life-or-death struggle existed between them. Many racists declared that Jews were a separate race, alien to Europe.

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, Germany made a major effort to build a colonial empire overseas. That effort produced the Herero and Nama genocide, followed by a racial apartheid regime in South West Africa. World War I, fought from 1914 to 1918, then intensified nationalist and racist feeling in Germany and elsewhere. Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by widespread pogroms. Germany emerged with two million war dead and a loss of substantial territory. The military promoted an untrue but compelling idea that Germany had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews, rather than beaten on the battlefield.

  The Nazi Party was founded in the wake of that war, and its ideology is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust. From the beginning the Nazis, not unlike other nation-states in Europe, dreamed of a world without Jews. They identified Jews as "the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity". They defined the German nation as a racial community unbounded by Germany's physical borders, and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements. Adolf Hitler and his party were also obsessed with reversing Germany's territorial losses and winning Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe for colonization. Many Germans found these ideas appealing.

  Hitler believed that Jews controlled the Soviet Union and the Western powers, and that they were plotting to destroy Germany. The Nazis also promised to protect European civilization from the Soviet threat.

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• 4. Laws, Violence and Flight

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  In the mid-1932 elections, the Nazi Party's support reached a high of 37 percent. It campaigned on anticommunism and economic recovery during a worldwide depression. Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 through a backroom deal supported by right-wing politicians. Within months all other political parties were banned and the regime had seized control of the media. Tens of thousands of political opponents, especially communists, were arrested, and a system of camps for extrajudicial imprisonment was set up.

  The regime also cracked down on Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, and people seen as workshy, imprisoning many of them in concentration camps. The Nazis forcibly sterilized 400,000 people and subjected others to forced abortions for real or supposed hereditary illnesses. Even so, repression fell almost entirely on groups viewed as outside the national community. Most Germans had little to fear as long as they did not oppose the regime. Economic growth, partly driven by rearmament, built popular support. So did the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938 and of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, while propaganda against Jews and other targets saturated daily life.

  In 1933 the roughly 500,000 German Jews made up less than 1 percent of the country's population. They were wealthier on average than other Germans and largely assimilated, although a minority were recent immigrants from eastern Europe. Government agencies, Nazi Party organizations and local authorities issued about 1,500 anti-Jewish laws. In 1933 alone, Jews were banned or restricted from several professions and from the civil service.

  The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 reserved full citizenship for those of "German or related blood". They also restricted Jewish economic activity and criminalized new marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. A Jew was defined as someone with three or four Jewish grandparents, while many with partial descent were classified as Mischlinge, with varying rights. Jewish students were gradually forced out of the school system, and some municipalities restricted where Jews could live or do business. In 1938 and 1939 more occupations were closed to Jews, and their businesses were expropriated to push them out of the economy.

  From 1933 to 1939, anti-Jewish violence, largely organized locally by Nazi Party institutions, took mostly non-lethal forms. Jewish stores, especially in rural areas, were boycotted or vandalized, and as many as a third of Jewish businesses may have been forced to close. Many small towns became entirely free of Jews. On the 9th and the 10th of November 1938, the Nazis organized a nationwide pogrom called Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Over 7,500 of 9,000 Jewish shops were looted, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and at least 90 Jews were murdered. As many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, though many were released within weeks. German Jews were then charged a special tax that raised more than 1 billion Reichsmarks.

  The regime wanted every Jew gone from Germany. Between 1933 and 1937, 130,000 managed to emigrate, most of them to South Africa, Mandatory Palestine and South America. Another 120,000 left in 1938 and 1939. Almost no country lowered its restrictions on immigration, so obtaining the necessary documents was difficult. By the end of 1939, those who remained behind were disproportionately elderly, poor or female. Before 1939, about 100,000 had reached the United States. About 50,000 each had gone to Palestine, the United Kingdom and Argentina, and 30,000 each to the Netherlands, Belgium, France, South Africa and Shanghai. Germany collected emigration taxes of nearly 1 billion Reichsmarks, mostly from Jews.

  Germany was not alone in turning authoritarian. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia all passed antisemitic legislation in the 1930s and 1940s. In October 1938, Germany deported many Polish Jews in response to a Polish law that allowed the revocation of citizenship for Polish Jews living abroad.

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• 5. Ghettos and Shooting Pits

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  Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939, and the United Kingdom and France declared war. During five weeks of fighting, as many as 16,000 civilians, hostages and prisoners of war may have been shot. Special units called Einsatzgruppen followed the army to eliminate possible resistance. Around 50,000 Polish and Polish Jewish leaders and intellectuals were arrested or executed. The Auschwitz concentration camp was established to hold members of the Polish intelligentsia who had not been killed in those purges.

  Germany now controlled 1.7 million Jews in Poland. The Nazis first tried to concentrate them in the Lublin District, and 45,000 had been deported there by November, left to fend for themselves. Hans Frank, leader of the General Governorate, did not want his territory to become a dumping ground. Deportations stopped in early 1940. After the conquest of France, the Nazis considered sending Jews to French Madagascar, but this proved impossible.

  In October 1939, adult Jews in the General Governorate were made to perform forced labor, and in November they were ordered to wear white armbands. Laws decreed the seizure of most Jewish property and the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses. The first ghettos appeared in the Wartheland and the General Governorate in 1939 and 1940, on the initiative of local German administrators. The largest, in Warsaw and Łódź, lay inside existing residential neighborhoods and were closed off by fences or walls. Many smaller ghettos had no fence at all. Workshops and factories operated inside some, and forced labor fed many residents and sometimes protected them from deportation. Because the ghettos were not separated by sex, some family life continued. A Jewish community leadership, the Judenrat, held limited authority and tried to sustain the community while following German demands. Jews in western Europe were not forced into ghettos, but they faced discriminatory laws and the confiscation of their property.

  On the 22nd of June 1941, Germany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Italy invaded the Soviet Union. Hitler saw an apocalyptic battle against Jewish Bolshevism, to be fought as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war. Planners expected a quick victory, to be followed by a project to remove 31 million people and replace them with German settlers. They also planned the mass starvation of Soviet cities. Soviet prisoners of war in German Army custody were meant to die in large numbers. Sixty percent, or 3.3 million people, died, mainly of starvation. They became the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing, after European Jews.

  The systematic murder of Jews began in the Soviet Union in 1941. Before the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen were reorganized and told to shoot Soviet officials and Jewish state and party employees. At first the victims were mainly adult male Jews who had worked as civil servants or in jobs requiring education, and tens of thousands were shot by the end of July. In July and August, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, visited the death squads' zones of operation and relayed orders to kill more Jews. The killers then began to murder Jewish women and children as well. Executions peaked at 40,000 a month in Lithuania in August and September, and reached their height in Belarus in October and November.

  The executions often took place a few kilometers from a town. Victims were marched to the site, forced to undress and shot into pits dug beforehand. The favored technique was a single bullet to the back of the neck, and in the chaos many victims were buried alive. Executions were often public spectacles, and the victims' property was looted by occupiers and local inhabitants alike. Local inhabitants killed as many as 50,000 Jews in pogroms in Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine and the Romanian borderlands. Romanian soldiers killed tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa by April 1942. Romania also deported about 154,000-170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to ghettos in Transnistria, where the total death toll may have reached 160,000. Around 200 ghettos were set up in the occupied Soviet Union, and many existed only briefly before their inhabitants were executed.

  The 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen proved insufficient, so Himmler mobilized 21 battalions of Order Police to help. Wehrmacht soldiers, Waffen-SS brigades and local auxiliaries also shot many Jews. By the end of 1941, more than 80 percent of the Jews in central Ukraine, eastern Belarus, Russia, Latvia and Lithuania had been shot. Farther west, fewer than 25 percent had been killed, and 900,000 remained alive. By the end of the war, around 1.5 to 2 million Jews had been shot, along with as many as 225,000 Roma. The murderers found the executions distressing and logistically inconvenient, and that influenced the decision to switch to other methods of killing.

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• 6. Camps and Trains

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  Most historians agree that Hitler issued an explicit order to kill all Jews across Europe, but they disagree about when. Some point to the shootings of Serbian Jews, the plans for extermination camps in Poland and the start of deportations of German Jews. They read these as signs that the final decision came before December 1941. Others argue that those policies were initiatives by local leaders and that the decision came later. Some historians also note that Hitler frequently gave major policy decisions to Himmler verbally rather than in written directives.

  On the 5th of December 1941, the Soviet Union launched its first major counteroffensive. On the 11th of December, Hitler declared war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day he told leading Nazi party officials, referring to his 1939 prophecy, "The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence." Organizing a continent-wide genocide still took several months. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, convened the Wannsee Conference on the 20th of January 1942 to coordinate anti-Jewish policy.

  The methods came partly from an earlier program. Aktion T4 used poison gas at specialized killing centers to murder around 70,000 institutionalized Germans with mental or physical disabilities. The victims included all 4,000 to 5,000 institutionalized Jews. Knowledge of the killings leaked out despite efforts at secrecy, and Hitler ordered the centralized program halted in August 1941. Many of the same personnel and technologies were later used for the mass murder of Jews.

  Gas vans developed from those used on mental patients since 1939 were first used in November 1941, killing victims with engine exhaust. The first extermination camp was Chełmno in the Wartheland, set up on the initiative of the local civil administrator Arthur Greiser, with Himmler's approval. It began operating in December 1941. In October 1941, Odilo Globocnik, the Higher SS and Police Leader of Lublin, began planning Belzec. It was the first purpose-built extermination camp with stationary gas chambers using carbon monoxide. In early 1942, Zyklon B became the preferred killing method, after gassing experiments on Russian prisoners of war in late August 1941.

  The camps stood on rail lines to ease transport, but in remote places to avoid notice. Except for deportations from western and central Europe, people traveled in overcrowded cattle cars, with as many as 150 forced into a single boxcar. Many died on the way, partly because the transports had low priority. Shortages of rail transport sometimes led to deportations being postponed or cancelled. On arrival, victims were robbed of their remaining possessions, forced to undress, had their hair cut and were driven into the gas chamber. Death could take as long as 30 minutes. The chambers were primitive and sometimes malfunctioned, and some prisoners were shot instead. At Auschwitz, which began selections upon arrival in July 1942, around 20-25 percent were separated out for labor, though many of them died later.

  Treblinka, in the Warsaw District, killed an estimated 780,863-951,800 Jews between July 1942 and October 1943. Auschwitz II-Birkenau killed an estimated 900,000-1,000,000. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka reported a combined revenue of 178.7 million Reichsmarks from victims' belongings, far exceeding their costs. Together the three camps needed fewer than 3,000 Jewish prisoners, 1,000 Trawniki men, largely Ukrainian auxiliaries, and very few German guards. About half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died by poison gas. Prisoner uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor meant that those camps were shut down earlier than the Nazis had planned.

  In March 1942, killings began at Belzec, targeting Jews from Lublin who could not work. The action reportedly reduced the black market and was judged a success to be repeated elsewhere. Plans to kill most Jews in the General Governorate reflected goals of the SS, the military and the civil administration. They wanted to cut the food eaten by Jews, allow a slight increase in rations for non-Jewish Poles and combat the black market. By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided that only 300,000 Jews would be allowed to survive in the General Governorate to the end of the year, as forced laborers, mostly in armaments production. During this campaign 1.5 million Polish Jews were murdered, in the largest killing operation of the Holocaust.

  Ghettos were raided without warning, usually in the early morning, and the scale of the operation was hidden for as long as possible. Trawniki men cordoned off the ghetto while the Order Police and Security Police carried out the action. Jewish councils and Jewish ghetto police were often ordered to assist, though most of them were murdered later. The Warsaw Ghetto was cleared between the 22nd of July and the 12th of September 1942. Of its 350,000 Jews, 250,000 were killed at Treblinka, 11,000 were deported to labor camps and 10,000 were shot in the ghetto. A final selection let 35,000 remain, and around 20,000 or 25,000 managed to hide inside it. Misdirection convinced many that they could avoid deportation until it was too late.

  Ghetto uprisings came only when inhabitants began to believe their deaths were certain. In 1943, larger uprisings in Warsaw, Białystok and Glubokoje required the use of heavy weapons to suppress. The Warsaw uprising led the Nazi leadership to liquidate more ghettos and labor camps in occupied Poland, out of fear that further Jewish resistance would develop.

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• 7. Complicity and Refusal

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  An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Germans were directly involved in killing Jews. Counting everyone who helped organize the extermination, the number rises to 500,000. Studies of the SS officials who organized the Holocaust found that most had a strong ideological commitment to Nazism. Many perpetrators were also motivated by material gain and social advancement. German SS, police and army units rarely had trouble finding enough men to shoot Jewish civilians, even though punishment for refusing was absent or light.

  Non-German perpetrators included Dutch, French and Polish policemen, Romanian soldiers, foreign SS and police auxiliaries, Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans and some civilians. Some were coerced. Others killed for entertainment, for material rewards, for the chance of better treatment from the occupiers, or out of nationalism and anticommunism. According to Christian Gerlach, non-Germans "not under German command" caused 5 to 6 percent of Jewish deaths.

  Millions of Germans and others benefited from the genocide. Different German state agencies competed to receive the property stolen from Jews murdered at the death camps. Many workers obtained better jobs vacated by murdered Jews, and businessmen gained by eliminating Jewish competitors or taking over their businesses. Others took over housing and possessions that had belonged to Jews. Some Poles living near the extermination camps later dug up human remains in search of valuables. Even puppet states such as Vichy France and Norway successfully laid claim to Jewish property. In the decades after the war, Swiss banks became notorious for harboring gold deposited by Nazis, and for profiting from unclaimed deposits made by victims. Several companies that remain prominent today also benefited, among them Bayer, BMW and Volkswagen.

  In 1942, nearly 100,000 Jews were deported from Belgium, France and the Netherlands. In France, 25 percent of the Jews were killed, most of them non-citizens or recent immigrants. Si Kaddour Benghabrit and Abdelkader Mesli saved hundreds of Jews by hiding them in the basements of the Grand Mosque of Paris. The death rate in the Netherlands was higher than in neighboring countries. Scholars attribute this to the difficulty of hiding there, or to greater collaboration by the Dutch police.

  Slovakia was the first Axis ally to hand over its Jews, deporting about 58,000 to Poland between March and October 1942. Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, who were murdered at Treblinka. It refused to deport Jews from its prewar territory, however, because of widespread opposition from prominent individuals and groups within the country. Hungary deported few of its roughly 846,000 Jews until the German occupation of March 1944. Between then and the 9th of July 1944, 434,000 of the 825,000 Hungarian Jews still alive were deported by train, mostly to Auschwitz. Roughly 255,000 Hungarian Jews, or 29.6 percent, are estimated to have survived the war.

  Before the German occupation of Italy in September 1943, there was no serious attempt to deport Italian Jews, and Italy refused to allow deportations from many Italian-occupied areas. In early 1943-45,000 Jews were deported from German-occupied northern Greece, primarily Salonica, to Auschwitz, where nearly all were killed. In late 1943, most Danish Jews escaped to Sweden with the help of the Danish resistance, facing only a half-hearted German deportation effort.

  Gerlach estimates that 200,000 Jews survived in hiding across Europe. Survival depended on money, social connections with non-Jews, a non-Jewish appearance, perfect command of the local language, determination and luck. Hunters tracked down those in hiding with the help of local collaborators, and rewards were offered for denunciations. The death penalty was sometimes enforced on people who sheltered Jews, especially in eastern Europe. Rescuers' motives ranged from altruism to expecting sex or material gain, and helpers sometimes betrayed or murdered Jews when their money ran out. Gerlach argues that hundreds of thousands of Jews may have died because of rumors or denunciations.

  Jews took part in resistance movements in most European countries, and were often overrepresented. In Belarus, with its dense forests, an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Jews joined Soviet partisans across the Soviet Union. Another 10,000 to 13,000 Jewish non-combatants lived in family camps in the forests of Eastern Europe. The best known of these was run by the Bielski partisans. Jews were not always welcome in nationalist resistance groups, and some of those groups killed Jews.

  On the 26th of June 1942, BBC services in all languages publicized a report documenting the killing of 700,000 Jews in Poland. It had been prepared by the Jewish Social-Democratic Bund and other resistance groups, and transmitted by the Polish government-in-exile. In December 1942, the Allies, then known as the United Nations, adopted a joint declaration condemning the systematic murder of Jews. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee raised $70 million during the war and $300 million in the years after. It kept sending relief to Jews under German occupation even after the United States banned such shipments, and from 1939 to 1944 it helped 81,000 European Jews emigrate. Appeals from Jewish representatives to bomb the rail lines leading to the camps, or the crematoriums, were rejected by the American and British governments. No detailed photo intelligence study of the major camps was carried out during the war, and historians still debate whether a military response would have changed anything.

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• 8. Liberation and Memory

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  In July 1944, Soviet forces advancing through occupied Poland liberated the Majdanek concentration camp, and the atrocities found there were publicized. Soon afterward Himmler ordered all concentration camp prisoners evacuated to the interior of the Reich. The SS did not want liberated inmates giving testimony to the Allies. It also wanted to keep forced laborers producing armaments. Himmler further hoped to use Jewish prisoners as hostages for a peace deal with the Western Allies that would preserve the Nazi regime. Evacuations by train, and by ship from the cut-off Baltics, gave way to forced marches as winter approached. Those who could not keep up were shot.

  The last mass gassing at a killing center took place at Auschwitz in November 1944, after which the gas chambers were shut down and destroyed. In January 1945, most of the remaining 67,000 Auschwitz prisoners were sent on a death march westward. That month more than 700,000 people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system, and as many as a third died before the war ended. Around 70,000 to 100,000 Jews died in the war's last months. Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on the 27th of January 1945 and found a few thousand inmates still there. In Germany, Western Allied liberators found piles of corpses that they had to bulldoze into mass graves.

  Around six million Jews were killed. A conservative estimate is 5.7 million killed by the Germans and Romanians, of whom 5.4 million died under Nazi occupation. Half of the victims came from Poland, and 2.6 million from within the 1941 Soviet borders. About 1.3 million Jews who had lived under Nazi rule or in one of Germany's allies survived. One-third of the world's Jews and two-thirds of European Jews had been wiped out. Emigration and protection by Germany's allies saved around 600,000 Jews. Children and the elderly faced even lower chances of survival than adults, and death rates approached 100 percent in some areas.

  On the 3rd of November 1943, around 18,400 Jews were murdered at Majdanek over nine hours, the largest number ever killed in a death camp on a single day. It was part of Operation Harvest Festival, the murder of some 43,000 Jews on the 3rd and the 4th of November 1943. Operation Reinhard, from March 1942 to November 1943, killed roughly two million Jews in the General Government district of occupied Poland. Historian Gerlach states that over three million Jews were killed in 1942 alone.

  After liberation, many Jews tried to return home. Limited success in finding relatives, the refusal of many non-Jews to give back property, and violent attacks such as the Kielce pogrom convinced many survivors to leave eastern Europe. When the war ended, fewer than 28,000 German Jews and 60,000 non-German Jews were in Germany. By 1947 the number had risen to 250,000, as communist authorities allowed emigration from eastern Europe. Jews made up around 25 percent of the population of displaced persons camps, where survivors organized self-government, education and rehabilitation. Many stayed in Germany until the establishment of Israel in 1948, and others moved to the United States around 1950 when immigration restrictions loosened.

  Most perpetrators were never put on trial. In 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal tried 23 Nazi leaders, primarily for waging wars of aggression. Even so, the systematic murder of Jews came to take center stage. The United States Army alone charged 1,676 defendants in 462 war crimes trials. West Germany later investigated 100,000 people and tried more than 6,000 defendants, mainly low-level perpetrators. The United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948 was not used in Holocaust trials, because criminal laws are not retroactive. The high-level organizer Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped and tried in Israel in 1961. Prosecutors there asked many survivors to testify rather than relying on documents, a strategy that increased publicity but proved controversial.

  Historians estimate that property losses to the Jews of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Poland and Hungary came to around 10 billion in 1944 dollars. Between 1945 and 2018, Germany paid $86.8 billion in restitution and compensation to survivors and heirs. In 1952, West Germany agreed to pay DM 3 billion, around $714 million, to Israel, and DM 450 million, around $107 million, to the Claims Conference. Many programs still fell short of restoring prewar assets, and large amounts of immovable property were never returned. Poland is the only European Union member that never passed any restitution legislation.

  In the decades after the war, Holocaust memory was largely confined to survivors and their communities. Its popularity peaked in the 1990s after the fall of Communism. Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses asserted that "the Holocaust has gradually supplanted genocide as modernity's icon of evil". International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed each year on the 27th of January. West Germany developed a self-critical memory of the Holocaust in the 1970s and 1980s, and that memory later spread to parts of western Europe and into the identity of the European Union. In the United States, the memory tends to be more abstract and universalized. Scholar Omer Bartov points to what made the event unique: "the industrial killing of millions of human beings in factories of death, ordered by a modern state, organized by a conscientious bureaucracy, and supported by a law-abiding, patriotic 'civilized' society."

  According to the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, the world Jewish population reached 15.2 million by the end of 2020. That is approximately 1.4 million fewer than the 16.6 million who were alive on the eve of the Holocaust in 1939.

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