Legends stories
Lithographs by Marcel Janco

This book of popular legends was written by M. SEGAL, published in Israel in the early 1950's (undated). The book contains 7 BEAUTIFUL LITHOGRAPHS that made by the artist MARCEL JANCO especially for this book. The lithographs are on full page, printed on one side of the page. The book contains 54 pages. Very good condition. Inscribed by the author Moshe Segal. Size: 9.5x7 inch.

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Marcel Janco (German: [maɐ̯ˈsɛl ˈjaŋko], French: [maʁsɛl ʒɑ̃ko], common rendition of the Romanian name Marcel Hermann Iancu[1] pronounced [marˈt͡ʃel ˈherman ˈjaŋku], last name also Ianco, Janko or Jancu; May 24, 1895 – April 21, 1984) was a Romanian and Israeli visual artist, architect and art theorist. He was the co-inventor of Dadaism and a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s, he co-edited, with Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara, the Romanian art magazine Simbolul. Janco was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Futurism and Expressionism before contributing his painting and stage design to Tzara's literary Dadaism. He parted with Dada in 1919, when he and painter Hans Arp founded a Constructivist circle, Das Neue Leben. Reunited with Vinea, he founded Contimporanul, the influential tribune of the Romanian avant-garde, advocating a mix of Constructivism, Futurism and Cubism. At Contimporanul, Janco expounded a "revolutionary" vision of urban planning. He designed some of the most innovative landmarks of downtown Bucharest. He worked in many art forms, including illustration, sculpture and oil painting. Janco was one of the leading Romanian Jewish intellectuals of his generation. Targeted by antisemitic persecution before and during World War II, he emigrated to British Palestine in 1941. He won the Dizengoff Prize and Israel Prize, and was a founder of Ein Hod, a utopian art colony, controversially built over a depopulated Palestinian Arab village (itself relocated to Ein Hawd). Marcel Janco was the brother of Georges and Jules Janco, who were his artistic partners during and after the Dada episode. His brother-in-law and fellow Constructivist promoter was the writer Jacques G. Costin, known as a survivor of 1940s antisemitism. Contents  [hide]  1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Swiss journey and Dada events 1.3 "Two-speeds" Dada and Das Neue Leben 1.4 Between Béthune and Bucharest 1.5 Contimporanul beginnings 1.6 Functionalist breakthrough 1.7 Between Contimporanul and Criterion 1.8 Persecution and departure 1.9 In Israel 2 Work 2.1 From Iser's Postimpressionism to Expressionist Dada 2.2 Primitive and collective art 2.3 Beyond Constructivism 2.4 Holocaust art and Israeli abstractionism 3 Legacy 4 See also 5 References 5.1 Bibliography 6 External links Biography[edit] Early life[edit] Marcel Janco was born on May 24, 1895 in Bucharest to an upper middle class Jewish family.[2] His father, Hermann Zui Iancu, was a textile merchant. His mother, Rachel née Iuster, was from Moldavia.[3] The couple lived outside Bucharest's Jewish quarter, on Decebal Street.[4] He was the oldest of four children. His brothers were Iuliu (Jules) and George. His sister, Lucia, was born in 1900.[4] The Iancus moved from Decebal to Gândului Street, and then to Trinității, where they built one of the largest home-and-garden complexes in early 20th century Bucharest.[5] In 1980, Janco revisited his childhood years, writing: "Born as I was in beautiful Romania, into a family of well-to-do people, I had the fortune of being educated in a climate of freedom and spiritual enlightenment. My mother, [...] possessing a genuine musical talent, and my father, a stern man and industrious merchant, had created the conditions favorable for developing all of my aptitudes. [...] I was of a sensitive and emotional nature, a withdrawn child who was predisposed to dreaming and meditating. [...] I grew up [...] dominated by a strong sense of humanity and social justice. The existence of disadvantaged, weak, people, of impoverished workers, of beggars, hurt me and, when compared to our family's decent condition, awoke in me a feeling of guilt."[6] Janco attended Gheorghe Șincai School and studied drawing art with the Romanian Jewish painter and cartoonist Iosif Iser.[7] In his teenage years, the family traveled widely, from Austria-Hungary to Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands.[8] At Gheorghe Lazăr High School, he met several students who would become his artistic companions: Tzara (known then as S. Samyro), Vinea (Iovanaki), writers Jacques G. Costin and Poldi Chapier.[9] Janco also became friends with pianist Clara Haskil, the subject of his first published drawing, which appeared in Flacăra magazine in March 1912.[10][11] As a group, the students were under the influence of Romanian Symbolist clubs, which were at the time the more radical expressions of artistic rejuvenation in Romania. Marcel and Jules Janco's first moment of cultural significance took place in October 1912, when they joined Tzara in editing the Symbolist venue Simbolul, which managed to receive contributions from some of Romania's leading modern poets, from Alexandru Macedonski to Ion Minulescu and Adrian Maniu. The magazine nevertheless struggled to find its voice, alternating modernism with the more conventional Symbolism.[12] Janco was perhaps the main graphic designer of Simbolul, and he may even have persuaded his wealthy parents to support the venture (which closed down in early 1913).[13] Unlike Tzara, who refused to look back on Simbolulwith anything but embarrassment, Janco was proud of this moment in life, depicting it as his first participation in artistic revolution.[14] After the Simbolul moment, Marcel Janco worked at Seara daily, where he took further training in draftsmanship.[15] The newspaper took him in as illustrator, probably as a result of intercessions from Vinea, its literary columnist.[10] Their Simbolul colleague Costin joined them as Seara's cultural editor.[10][16] Janco was also a visitor of the literary and art club meeting at the home of controversial politician and Symbolist poet Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, who was for a while the manager of Seara.[17] It is possible that, during those years, Tzara and Janco first came to hear and be influenced by the absurdist prose of Urmuz, the lonesome civil clerk and amateur writer who would later become the hero of Romanian modernism.[18] Years later, in 1923, Janco drew an ink portrait of Urmuz.[19] In maturity, he also remarked that Urmuz was the original rebel figure in Romanian literature.[20] In the 1910s, Janco was also interested in the parallel development of French literature, and read passionately from such authors as Paul Verlaine and Guillaume Apollinaire.[21] Another immediate source of inspiration for his attitude on life was provided by Futurism, an anti-establishment movement created in Italy by poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his artists' circle.[22] Swiss journey and Dada events[edit] Hugo Ball in the "bishop dress", 1916 Janco eventually decided to leave Romania, probably because he wanted to attend international events such as the Sonderbund exhibit, but also because of quarrels with his father.[15] In quick succession after the start of World War I, Marcel, Jules and Tzara left Bucharest for Zurich. According to various accounts, their departure may have been either a search for new opportunities (abundant in cosmopolitan Switzerland)[23] or a discreet pacifist statement.[24] Initially, the Jancos were registered with the University of Zurich, where Marcel took Chemistry courses, before applying to study Architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology.[25] His real ambition, later confessed, was to pursue more training in painting.[6][26] The two brothers were soon joined by younger Georges Janco, but all three were left without any financial support when the war began hampering Europe's trade routes; until October 1917, both Jules and Marcel (who found it impossible to sell his various paintings) earned a living as cabaret performers.[26][27] Marcel was noted for performing selections from Romanian folklore and playing the accordion,[28] as well as for his rendition of chansons.[10][26] It was during this time that the young artist and his brothers began using the consecrated version of the surname Iancu, probably in hopes that it would sound more familiar to foreigners.[29] In this context, the Romanians came into contact with Hugo Ball and the other independent artists plying their trade at the Malerei building, which soon after became known as Cabaret Voltaire. Ball later recalled that four "Oriental" men introduced themselves to him late after a show—the description refers to Tzara, the older Jancos and, probably, the Romanian painter Arthur Segal.[30] Ball found the young painter especially pleasant, and was impressed that, unlike his peers, Janco was melancholy rather than ironic; other participants remember him as a very handsome presence in the group, and he allegedly had the reputation of a "lady-killer".[31] Accounts of what happened next differ, but it is presumed that, shortly after the four new participants were accepted, the performances became more daring, and the transition was made from Ball's Futurism to the virulent anti-art performances of Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck.[32] With help from Segal and others, Marcel Janco was personally involved in decorating the Cabaret Voltaire.[28] Its hectic atmosphere would inspire Janco to create an eponymous oil painting, dated 1916 and believed to have been lost.[33] He was a major contributor to the cabaret's events: he notably carved the grotesque masks worn by performers on stilts, gave "hissing concerts" and, in unison with Huelsenbeck and Tzara, improvised some of the first (and mostly onomatopoeic) "simultaneous poems" to be read on stage.[34] His work with masks became especially influential, opening up a new field of theatrical exploration for the Dadaists (as the Cabaret Voltaire crew began calling themselves), and earning special praise from Ball.[35] Contrary to Ball's later claim of authorship, Janco is also credited with having tailored the "bishop dress", another one of the iconic products of early Dadaism.[36] The actual birth of "Dadaism", at an unknown date, later formed the basis of disputes between Tzara, Ball and Huelsenbeck. In this context, Janco is cited as a source for the story according to which the invention of the term "Dada" belonged exclusively to Tzara.[37] Janco also circulated stories according to which their shows were attended for informative purposes by communist theorist Vladimir Lenin[38] and psychiatrist Carl Jung.[26] His various contributions were harnessed by Dada's international effort of self-promotion. In April 1917, he welcomed the Dada affiliation of Switzerland's own Paul Klee, calling Klee's contribution to the Dada exhibit a "great event".[39] His mask designs were popular beyond Europe, and inspired similar creations by Mexico's Germán Cueto, the "Stridentist" painter-puppeteer.[40] The Dadaist popularization effort received lukewarm responses in Janco's native country, where the traditionalist press expressed alarm at being confronted with Dada precepts.[41] Vinea himself was ambivalent about the activities of his two friends, preserving a link with poetic tradition which made his publication in Tzara's press impossible.[42] In a letter to Janco, Vinea spoke about having personally presented one of Janco's posters to modernist poet and art critic Tudor Arghezi: "[He] said, critically, that you cannot say whether a person is talented or not on the basis of only one drawing. Rubbish."[43] Exhibited at the Dada group shows, Janco also illustrated the Dada advertisements, including an April 1917 program which features his sketches of Ball, Tzara and Ball's actress wife Emmy Hennings.[44] The event featured his production of Oskar Kokoschka's farce Sphinx und Strohmann, for which he was also the stage designer, and which was turned into one of the most notorious among Dada provocations.[45] Janco was the director and mask designer for the Dada production for another one of Kokoschka's plays, Job.[46] He also returned as Tzara's illustrator, producing the linocuts to The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, having already created the props for its theatrical production.[47] "Two-speeds" Dada and Das Neue Leben[edit] Viking Eggeling's drawings for a Generalbass der Malerei ("General Basis of Painting"), 1918 As early as 1917, Marcel Janco began taking his distance from the movement he had helped to generate. His work, in both woodcut and linocut, continued to be used as the illustration to Dada almanacs for another two years,[48] but he was more often than not in disagreement with Tzara, while also trying to diversify his style. As noted by critics, he found himself split between the urge to mock traditional art and the belief that something just as elaborate needed to take its place: in the conflict between Tzara's nihilism and Ball's art for art's sake, Janco tended to support the latter.[49] In a 1966 text, he further assessed that there were "two speeds" in Dada, and that the "spiritual violence" phase had eclipsed the "best Dadas", including his fellow painter Hans Arp.[50] Janco recalled: "We [Janco and Tzara] couldn't agree any more on the importance of Dada, and the misunderstandings accumulated."[51] There were, he noted, "dramatic fights" sparked by Tzara's taste for "bad jokes and scandal".[52] The artist preserved a grudge, and his retrospective views on Tzara's role in Zurich are often sarcastic, depicting him as an excellent organizer and vindictive self-promoter, but not truly a man of culture;[53] a few years into the scandal, he even started a rumor that Tzara was illegally trading in opium.[54] As noted in 2007 by Romanian literary historian Paul Cernat: "All the efforts by Ion Vinea to reunite them [...] would be in vain. Iancu and Tzara would ignore (or banter) each other for the rest of their lives".[55] With this split, there came a certain classicization in Marcel Janco's discourse. In February 1918, Janco was even invited to lecture at his alma mater, where he spoke about modernism and authenticity in art as related phenomena, drawing comparisons between the Renaissance and African art.[56] However, having decided to focus on his other projects, Janco nearly abandoned his studies, and failed his final exam.[57] In this context, he moved closer to the cell of post-Dada Constructivists exhibiting collectively as Neue Kunst ("New Art")—Arp, Fritz Baumann, Hans Richter, Otto Morach.[58] As a result, Janco was made a member of Das Neue Lebenfaction, which supported an educational approach to modern art, coupled with socialist ideals and Constructivist aesthetics.[59] In its art manifesto, the group declared its ideal of "rebuild[ing] the human community" in preparation for the end of capitalism.[60] Janco was even affiliated with Artistes Radicaux, a more politically inclined section of Das Neue Leben, where his colleagues included other former Dadas: Arp, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling.[61] The Artistes Radicaux were in touch with the German Revolution, and Richter, who worked for the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, even offered Janco and the others virtual teaching positions at the Academy of Fine Arts under a workers' government.[62] Between Béthune and Bucharest[edit] Janco made his final contribution to the Dada adventure in April 1919, when he designed the masks for a major Dada event organized by Tzara at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, and which degenerated into an infamous mass brawl.[63] By May, he was mandated by Das Neue Leben to create and publish a journal for the movement. Although this never saw print, the preparations placed Janco in contact with the representatives of various modernist currents: Arthur Segal, Walter Gropius, Alexej von Jawlensky, Oscar Lüthy and Enrico Prampolini.[64] This period also witnessed the start of a friendly relationship between Janco and the Expressionist artists who published in Herwarth Walden's magazine Der Sturm.[65] A little more than a year after the end of war, in December 1919, Marcel and Jules left Switzerland for France. After passing through Paris, the painter was in Béthune, where he married Amélie Micheline "Lily" Ackermann, in what was described as a gesture of fronde against his father. The girl was a Swiss Catholic of lowly condition, who had first met the Jancos at Das Neue Leben.[66] Janco was probably in Béthune for a longer while: he was listed as one of those considered for helping to rebuild war-affected French Flanders, redesigned the Chevalier-Westrelin store in Hinges, and was perhaps the co-owner of an architectural enterprise, Ianco & Déquire.[67] It is not unlikely that Janco followed with curiosity the activities of Dada's Parisian cell, which were overseen by Tzara and his pupil André Breton, and he is known to have impressed Breton with his own architectural projects.[68] He was also announced, with Tzara, as a contributor to the post-Dada magazine L'Esprit Nouveau, published by Paul Dermée.[69] Nevertheless, Janco was invited to exhibit elsewhere, rallying with Section d'Or, a Cubist collective.[68] Late in 1921, Janco and his wife left for Romania, where they had a second marriage to seal their union in front of familial disputes.[70] Janco was soon reconciled with his parents, and, although still unlicensed as an architect, began receiving his first commissions, some of which came from within his own family.[71][72] His early contributions, officially registered as the work of one I. Rosenthal, are the rather traditional seven buildings on Hermann Iancu's property, at Trinității Street, 29—one of them became his new home.[73] The site, extended in later years, was completed with new buildings by Janco down to the mid-1930s; this pet project resulted in some of the most experimental buildings in the history of Romanian architecture, in striking contrast with the antique design prevalent in the surrounding Hala Traianquarter.[71] Together with Jules, Janco eventually opened up his own business venture, Birou de Studii Moderne (Office of Modern Studies). It was housed in a building of their own design, at the junction of Caimatei and Trinității, and officially run by a fictitious person, Marcel Iuliu Iancu.[74] Soon after making his comeback, Marcel Janco reconnected himself with the local avant-garde salons, and had his first Romanian exhibits, at the Maison d'Art club in Bucharest.[75] His friends and collaborators, among them actress Dida Solomon and journalist-director Sandu Eliad, would describe him as exceptionally charismatic and knowledgeable.[76] In December 1926, he was present at the Hasefer Art Show in Bucharest.[77] Around that year, Janco took commissions as an art teacher at his studio in Bucharest—in the words of his pupil, the future painter-photographer Hedda Sterne, these were unimpressive: "We were given easels, etc. but nobody looked, nobody advised us."[78] Contimporanul beginnings[edit] From his position as Constructivist mentor and international artist, Janco proceeded to network between Romanian modernist currents, and joined up with his old colleague Vinea. Early in 1922, the two men founded a political and art magazine, the influential Contimporanul—historically, the longest-lived venue of the Romanian avant-garde.[79] Janco was abroad that year, as one of guests at the First Constructivist Congress, convened by Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg in Düsseldorf.[80] He was in Zurich around 1923, receiving the visit of a compatriot, writer Victor Eftimiu, who declared him a hard-working artist able to reconcile the modern with the traditional.[81] Contimporanul followed Janco's Constructivist affiliation. Initially a venue for socialist satire and political commentary, it reflected Vinea's strong dislike for the ruling National Liberal Party.[82] However, by 1923, the journal became increasingly cultural and artistic in its revolt, headlining with translations from van Doesburg and Breton, publishing Vinea's own homage to Futurism, and featuring illustrations and international notices which Janco may have handpicked himself.[83] Some researchers have attributed the change exclusively to the painter's growing say in editorial policy.[84][85] Janco was at the time in correspondence with Dermée, who was to contribute the Contimporanul anthology of modern French poetry,[86] and with fellow painter Michel Seuphor, who collected Janco's Constructivist sculptures.[87]He maintained a link between Contimporanul and Der Sturm, which republished his drawings alongside the contributions of various Romanian avant-garde writers and artists.[88] The reciprocal popularization was taken up by Ma, the Vienna-based tribune of Hungarian modernists, which also published samples of Janco's graphics.[89]Owing to Janco's resentments and Vinea's apprehension, the magazine never covered the issuing of new Dada manifestos, and responded critically to Tzara's new versions of Dada history.[90] Marcel Janco also took charge of Contimporanul's business side, designing its offices on Imprimerie Street and overseeing the publication of postcards.[91] Over the years, his own contributions to Contimporanul came to include some 60 illustrations, some 40 articles on art and architectural topics, and a number of his architectural designs or photographs of buildings erected from them.[92] He oversaw one of the journal's first special issues, dedicated to "Modern Architecture", and notably hosting his own contributions to architectural theory, as well as his design of a "country workshop" for Vinea's use.[93] Other issues also featured his essay on film and theater, his furniture designs, and his interview with the French Cubist Robert Delaunay.[94] Janco was also largely responsible for the Contimporanul issue on Surrealism, which included his interviews with writers such as Joseph Delteil, and his inquiry about the publisher Simon Krà.[95] Together with Romanian Cubist painter M. H. Maxy, Janco was personally involved in curating the Contimporanul International Art Exhibit of 1924.[96] This event reunited the major currents of Europe's modern art, reflecting Contimporanul's eclectic agenda and international profile. It hosted samples of works by leading modernists: the Romanians Segal, Constantin Brâncuși, Victor Brauner, János Mattis-Teutsch, Milița Petrașcu, alongside Arp, Eggeling, Klee, Richter, Lajos Kassákand Kurt Schwitters.[97] The exhibit included samples of Janco's work in furniture design, and featured his managerial contribution to a Dada-like opening party, co-produced by him, Maxy, Vinea and journalist Eugen Filotti.[98] He was also involved in preparing the magazine's theatrical parties, including the 1925 production of A Merry Death, by Nikolai Evreinov; Janco was the set and costume designer, and Eliad the director.[99] An unusual echo of the exhibit came in 1925, when Contimporanul published a photograph of Brâncuși's Princess X sculpture. The Romanian Police saw this as a sexually explicit artwork, and Vinea and Janco were briefly taken into custody.[100] Janco was a dedicated admirer of Brâncuși, visiting him in Paris and writing in Contimporanul about Brâncuși's "spirituality of form" theories.[101] In their work as cultural campaigners, Vinea and Janco even collaborated with 75 HP, a periodical edited by poet Ilarie Voronca, which was nominally anti-Contimporanul and pro-Dada.[102] Janco was also an occasional presence in the pages of Punct, the Dadaist-Constructivist paper put out by the socialist Scarlat Callimachi. It was here that he notably published articles on architectural styles and a lampoon, in French and German, titled T.S.F. Dialogue entre le bourgeois mort et l'apôtre de la vie nouvelle ("Cablegram. The Dialogue between a Dead Bourgeois and the Apostle of New Living").[84][103] In addition, his graphic work was popularized by Voronca's other magazine, the Futurist tribune Integral.[104] Janco was also called upon by authors Ion Pillat and Perpessicius to illustrate their Antologia poeților de azi ("The Anthology of Present-Day Poets"). His portraits of the writers included, drawn in sharply modernist style, were received with amusement by the traditionalist public.[105] In 1926, Janco further antagonized the traditionalists by publishing sensual drawings for Camil Baltazar's book of erotic poems, Strigări trupești lîngă glezne("Bodily Exhortations around the Ankles").[106] Functionalist breakthrough[edit] Profiting from the building boom of Greater Romania, and the rising popularity of functionalism, Janco's Birou was in much demand. Compared with mainstream functionalist architects like Horia Creangă, Arghir Culina, Rudolf Fränkel or Marcel Locar, the Jancos received commissions that were sparse and small-scale, but they had a decisive role in popularizing the functionalist versions of Constructivism or Cubism.[107] Heralding the change of architectural tastes with his articles in Contimporanul, Marcel Janco described Romania's capital as a chaotic, inharmonious, backward town, in which the traffic was hampered by carts and trams.[108] A major breakthrough was his Villa Jean Fuchs, built in 1926 on Negustori Street. Its cosmopolitan owner allowed the artist complete freedom in designing the building, purportedly the first Constructivist structure in Bucharest,[109] and a budget of 1 million lei.[71] The result caused a stir in the neighborhood, while the press found it to be reminiscent of a "morgue" and a "crematorium".[71] The architect and his patrons were undeterred by such reactions, and the Janco firm received commissions to build similar villas, as well as the Philippe Suchard pavilion at the Obor fair of 1926.[71] Until 1934, when Marcel Janco finally received his certification, his designs continued to be officially recorded under different names, most usually attributed to a Constantin Simionescu.[71] This had little effect on the Birou's output: before 1937, Janco and his brother designed some 40 permanent or temporary structures in Bucharest, all of them located in the northern and central areas (the "Yellow" and "Black" sectors, as they were known at the time).[71] These and other projects also involved the 1924 exhibit's Milița Petrașcu, who is herself better known as a modernist sculptor.[110] Several other Bucharest homes result from this creative collaboration: the Maria Lambru Villa of 1928, on Popa Savu Street; the Florica Chihăescu house on Șoseaua Kiseleff (1930); the Jean Juster and Paul Wexler Villas, on Silvestru and Grigore Mora streets, respectively (1931).[71] Janco also designed a house for his Simbolulfriend Poldi Chapier. Located on Ipătescu Alley and finished in 1929,[71] this was occasionally described as "Bucharest's first Cubist lodging".[111] These projects are joined by a private sanatorium of Predeal, which is the principal of Janco's Constructivist designs outside of Bucharest.[109] Janco had one daughter from his marriage to Lily Ackermann, who signed her name Josine Ianco-Starrels (b. 1926), and was raised a Catholic.[112] Her sister Claude-Simone had died in infancy.[113] By the mid-1920s, Marcel and Lily Janco were estranged: already by the time of their divorce (1930), she was living by herself in a Brașov home designed by Janco.[113] The artist remarried to Clara "Medi" Goldschlager, the sister of his old friend Jacques G. Costin. The couple had a girl, Deborah Theodora ("Dadi" for short).[113] With his new family, Janco lived a comfortable life, traveling throughout Europe and spending his summer vacations in the resort town of Balcic.[113] In 1931, Janco built himself a new family home, the blockhouse known as "Clara Iancu Building", on Caimatei.[71] The Jancos and the Costins also shared ownership of a country estate: known as Jacquesmara,[114] it was located in Budeni-Comana, Giurgiu County.[6][10] The house is especially known for hosting Clara Haskil during one of her triumphant returns to Romania.[10] Between Contimporanul and Criterion[edit] Janco was still active as the art editor of Contimporanul during its final and most eclectic series of 1929,[115] when he took part in selecting new young contributors, such as publicist and art critic Barbu Brezianu.[116] At that junction, the magazine triumphantly published a "Letter to Janco", in which the formerly traditionalist architect George Matei Cantacuzino spoke about his colleague's decade-long contribution to the development of Romanian functionalism.[71][117] Beyond his Contimporanulaffiliation, Janco rallied with the Bucharest collective Arta Nouă ("New Art"), also joined by Maxy, Brauner, Mattis-Teutsch, Petrașcu, Nina Arbore, Cornelia Babic-Daniel, Alexandru Brătășanu, Olga Greceanu, Corneliu Michăilescu, Claudia Millian, Tania Șeptilici and others.[118] Janco and some other regulars of Contimporanul also reached out to the Surrealist faction at unu review—Janco is notably mentioned as a "contributor" on the cover of unu, Summer 1930 issue, where all 8 containing pages were purposefully left blank.[119] Janco prepared woodcuts for the first edition of Vinea's novel Paradisul suspinelor ("The Paradise of Sobs"), printed with Editura Cultura Națională in 1930,[120][121] and for Vinea's poems in their magazine versions.[122] His drawings were used in illustrating two volumes of interviews with writers, compiled by Contimporanul sympathizer Felix Aderca,[123] and Costin's only volume of prose, the 1931 Exerciții pentru mâna dreaptă ("Right-handed Exercises").[120][124] Janco attended the 1930 reunion organized by Contimporanul in honor of the visiting Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and gave a welcoming speech.[125] Marinetti was again praised by the Contimporanul group (Vinea, Janco, Petrașcu, Costin) in February 1934, in an open letter stating: "We are soldiers of the same army."[126]These developments created a definitive split in Romania's avant-garde movement, and contributed to Contimporanul's eventual fall: the Surrealists and socialists at unu condemned Vinea and the rest for having established, through Marinetti, a connection with the Italian fascists.[127] After the incidents, Janco's art was openly questioned by unu contributors such as Stephan Roll.[128] Although Contimporanul went bankrupt, an artistic faction of the same name survived until 1936.[129] During the interval, Janco found other backers in the specialized art and architecture magazines, such as Orașul, Arta și Orașul, Rampa, Ziarul Științelor și al Călătoriilor.[71] In 1932, his villa designs were included by Alberto Sartorisin his guide to modern architecture, Gli elementi dell'architettura razionale.[71][130] The early 1930s also witnessed Janco's participation with the literary and art society Criterion, whose leader was philosopher Mircea Eliade. The group was mostly a venue Romania's intellectual youth, interested in redefining the national specificity around modernist values, but also offered a venue for dialogue between the far right and the far left.[131] With Maxy, Petrașcu, Mac Constantinescu, Petre Iorgulescu-Yor, Margareta Sterian and others, Janco represented the art collective at Criterion, which, in 1933, exhibited at Dalles Hall, Bucharest.[132] The same year, Janco erected a blockhouse for Costin (Paleologu Street, 5), which doubled as his own working address and the administrative office of Contimporanul.[71] From 1929, Janco's efforts to reform the capital received administrative support from Dem. I. Dobrescu, the left-wing Mayor of Bucharest.[133] 1934 was the year when Janco returned as architectural theorist, with Urbanism, nu romantism ("Urbanism, Not Romanticism"), an essay in the review Orașul. Janco's text restated the need and opportunity for modernist urban planning, especially in Bucharest.[71] Orașul, edited by Eliad and writer Cicerone Theodorescu, introduced him as a world-famous architect and "revolutionary", praising the diversity of his contributions.[71] In 1935, Janco published the pamphlet Către o arhitectură a Bucureștilor ("Toward an Architecture of Bucharest"), which recommended a "utopian" project to solve the city's social crisis.[71][76] Like some of his Contimporanul colleagues, he was by then collaborating with Cuvântul Liber, the self-styled "moderate left-wing review" and with Isac Ludo's modernist magazine, Adam.[134] He was at the time completing work on the Bazaltin Company headquarters on Jianu Square, the Solly Gold tenement on Hristo Botev Avenue, the Frida Cohen tower on Stelea Spătarul Street (the tallest among Janco's buildings) and the highrise on Ștefan Luchian Street (Janco's largest), the Iluță Laboratory on Olari Street, the Florica Reich Villa on Grigore Mora, and another home for Poldi Chapier.[71] Probably commissioned by Mircea Eliade, Janco also began work on the "Alexandrescu Building", a tenement for Eliade's sister and her family.[71] Together with Margareta Sterian, who became his disciple, Janco was working on artistic projects involving ceramics and fresco.[135] In 1936, some works by Janco, Maxy and Petrașcu represented Romania at the Futurist art show in New York City.[136] Throughout the period, Janco was still on demand as a draftsman: in 1934, his depiction of poet Constantin Nissipeanu opened the first print of Nisspeanu's Metamorfoze;[137] in 1936, he published a posthumous portrait of writer Mateiu Caragiale, to illustrate the Perpessicius edition of Caragiale's poems.[138] His prints also served to illustrate Sadismul adevărului ("The Sadism of Truth"), written by unu founder Sașa Pană.[139] Persecution and departure[edit] Janco and friends in the Hula Valley, 1938 By that moment in time, the Janco family was faced with the rise of antisemitism, and alarmed by the growth of fascist movements such as the Iron Guard. In the 1920s, the Contimporanul leadership had sustained a xenophobic attack from the traditionalist review Țara Noastră. It cited Vinea's Greek origins as a cause for concern,[140] and described Janco as the "painter of the cylinder", and an alien, cosmopolitan, Jew.[141] That objection to Janco's work, and to Contimporanul in general, was also taken up in 1926 by the anti-modernist essayist I. E. Torouțiu.[142] Criterion itself split in 1934, when some of its members openly rallied with the Iron Guard, and the radical press accused the remaining ones of promoting pederasty through their public performances.[143] Josine was expelled from Catholic school in 1935, the reason invoked being that her father was a Jew.[144] For Marcel Janco, the events were an opportunity to discuss his own assimilation into Romanian society: in one of his conferences, he defined himself as "an artist who is a Jew", rather than "a Jewish artist".[144] He later confessed his dismay at the attacks targeting him: "nowhere, never, in Romania or elsewhere in Europe, during peacetime or the cruel years of [World War I], did anyone ask me whether I was a Jew or... a kike. [...] Hitler's Romanian minions managed to change this climate, to turn Romania into an antisemitic country."[6] The ideological shift, he recalled, destroyed his relationships with the Contimporanul poet Ion Barbu, who reportedly concluded, after admiring a 1936 exhibit: "Too bad you're a kike!"[6] At around that time, pianist and fascist sympathizer Cella Delavrancea also assessed that Janco's contribution to theater was the prime example of "Jewish" and "bastard" art.[145] When the antisemitic National Christian Party took power, Janco was coming to terms with the Zionist ideology, describing the Land of Israel as the "cradle" and "salvation" of Jews the world over.[6][146] At Budeni, he and Costin hosted Betar paramilitaries, who were attempting to organize a Jewish self-defense movement.[6]Janco subsequently made his first trip to British Palestine, and began arranging his and his family's relocation there.[6][114][146][147] Although Jules and his family emigrated soon after the visit, Marcel returned to Bucharest and, shortly before Jewish art was officially censored, had his one last exhibit there, together with Milița Petrașcu.[114] He was also working on one of his last, and most experimental, contributions to Romanian architecture: the Hermina Hassner Villa (which also hosted his 1928 painting of the Jardin du Luxembourg), the Emil Petrașcu residence,[71] and a tower behind the Atheneum.[148] In 1939, the Nazi-aligned Ion Gigurtu cabinet enforced racial discrimination throughout the land, and, as a consequence, Jaquesmara was confiscated by the state.[114]Many of the Bucharest villas he had designed, which had Jewish landlords, were also taken over forcefully by the authorities.[71] Some months after, the National Renaissance Front government prevented Janco from publishing his work anywhere in Romania, but he was still able to find a niche at Timpul daily—its anti-fascistmanager, Grigore Gafencu, gave imprimatur to sketches, including the landscapes of Palestine.[147] He was also finding work with the ghettoized Jewish community, designing the new Barașeum Studio, located in the vicinity of Caimatei.[147] During the first two years of World War II, although he prepared his documents and received a special passport,[149] Janco was still undecided. He was still in Romania when the Iron Guard established its National Legionary State. He was receiving and helping Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, and hearing from them about the concentration camp system, but refused offers to emigrate into a neutral or Allied country.[6] His mind was made up in January 1941, when the Iron Guard's struggle for maintaining power resulted in the Bucharest Pogrom. Janco himself was a personal witness to the violent events, noting for instance that the Nazi German bystanders would declare themselves impressed by the Guard's murderous efficiency, or how the thugs made an example of the Jews trapped in the Choral Temple.[150]The Străulești Abbatoir murders and the stories of Jewish survivors also inspired several of Janco's drawings.[151] One of the victims of the Abbatoir massacre was Costin's brother Michael Goldschlager. He was kidnapped from his house by Guardsmen,[6] and his corpse was among those found hanging on hooks, mutilated in such way as to mock the Jewish kashrut ritual.[146][152] Janco's studio in Ein Hod Janco later stated that, over the course of a few days, the pogrom had made him a militant Jew.[6][153] With clandestine assistance from England,[6] Marcel, Medi and their two daughters left Romania through Constanța harbor, and arrived in Turkey on February 4, 1941. They then made their way to Islahiye and French Syria, crossing through the Kingdom of Iraq and Transjordan, and, on February 23, ended their journey in Tel Aviv.[154] The painter found his first employment as architect for Tel Aviv's city government, sharing the office with a Holocaust survivor who informed him about the genocide in occupied Poland.[6] In Romania, the new regime of Conducător Ion Antonescu planned a new series of antisemitic measures and atrocities (see Holocaust in Romania). In November 1941, Costin and his wife Laura, who had stayed behind in Bucharest, were among those deported to the occupied region of Transnistria.[154] Costin survived, joining up with his sister and with Janco in Palestine, but later moved back to Romania.[155] In Israel[edit] During his years in British Palestine, Marcel Janco became a noted participant in the development of local Jewish art. He was one of the four Romanian Jewish artists who marked the development of Zionist arts and crafts before 1950—the others were Jean David, Reuven Rubin, Jacob Eisenscher;[156] David, who was Janco's friend in Bucharest, joined him in Tel Aviv after an adventurous trip and internment in Cyprus.[157] In particular, Janco was an early influence on three Zionist artists who had arrived to Palestine from other regions: Avigdor Stematsky, Yehezkel Streichman and Joseph Zaritsky.[158] He was soon recognized as a leading presence in the artist community, receiving Tel Aviv Municipality's Dizengoff Prize in 1945, and again in 1946.[159] These contacts were not interrupted by the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and Janco was a figure of prominence in the art scene of independent Israel. The new nation enlisted his services as planner, and he was assigned to the team of Arieh Sharon, being tasked with designing and preserving the Israeli national parks.[160] As a result of his intervention, in 1949 the area of Old Jaffa was turned into an artist-friendly community.[160] He was again a recipient of the Dizengoff Prize in 1950 and 1951, resuming his activity as an art promoter and teacher, with lectures at the Seminar HaKibbutzim college (1953).[159] His artwork was again on show in New York City for a 1950 retrospective.[146] In 1952 he was one of three artists whose work was displayed at the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the first year Israel had its own pavilion at the Biennale. The other two artists were Reuven Rubin and Moshe Mokady.[161] Marcel Janco began his main Israeli project in May 1953, after he had been mandated by the Israeli government to prospect the mountainous regions and delimit a new national park south of Mount Carmel.[162] In his own account (since disputed by others),[160] he came across the deserted village of Ein Hod, which the Palestinian Arabs had largely discarded during the 1948 exodus. Janco felt that the place should not be demolished, obtaining a lease on it from the authorities, and rebuilt the place with other Israeli artists who worked there on weekends;[163] Janco's main residence continued to be in the neighborhood of Ramat Aviv.[148] His plot of land in Ein Hod was previously owned by the Arab Abu Faruq, who died in 1991 at the Jenin refugee camp.[164] Janco became the site's first mayor, reorganizing it into a utopian society, art colony and tourist attraction, and instituted the strict code of requirements for one's settlement in Ein Hod.[165] Janco (second from left) with Ofakim Hadashim colleagues at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1953 Also in the 1950s, Janco was a founding member of Ofakim Hadashim ("New Horizons") group, comprising Israeli painters committed to abstract art, and headed by Zaritsky. Although he shared the artistic vision, Janco probably did not approve of Zaritsky's rejection of all narrative art and, in 1956, left the group.[166][167] He continued to explore new media, and, together with artisan Itche Mambush, he created a series of reliefs and tapestries.[148][168] Janco also drew in pastel, and created humorous illustrations to Don Quixote.[149] His individual contributions received further praise from his peers and his public: in 1958, he was honored with the Histadrut union's prize.[159] Over the next two decades, Marcel Janco had several new personal exhibits, notably in Tel Aviv (1959, 1972), Milan (1960) and Paris (1963).[146] Having attended the 1966 Venice Biennale,[169] he won the Israel Prize of 1967, in recognition of his work as painter.[146][159][160][168][170] In 1960, Janco's presence in Ein Hod was challenged by the returning Palestinians, who tried to reclaim the land. He organized a community defense force, headed by sculptor Tuvia Iuster, which guarded Ein Hod until Israel Policeintervened against the protesters.[171] Janco was generally tolerant of those Palestinians who set up the small rival community of Ein Hawd: he notably maintained contacts with tribal leader Abu Hilmi and with Arab landscape artist Muin Zaydan Abu al-Hayja, but the relationship between the two villages was generally distant.[172] Janco has also been described as "disinterested" in the fate of his Arab neighbors.[160] For a second time, Janco reunited with Costin when the latter fled Communist Romania. The writer was a political refugee, singled out at home for "Zionist" activities, and implicated in the show trial of Milița Petrașcu.[124][173] Costin later left Israel, settling in France.[10][174] Janco himself made efforts to preserve a link with Romania, and sent albums to his artist friends beyond the Iron Curtain.[175] He met with folklorist and former political prisoner Harry Brauner,[169] poet Ștefan Iureș, painter Matilda Ulmu and art historian Geo Șerban.[148][149] His studio was home to other Jewish Romanian emigrants fleeing communism, including female artist Liana Saxone-Horodi.[148][168] From Israel, he spoke about his Romanian experience at length, first in an interview with writer Solo Har and then in a 1980 article for Shevet Romaniamagazine.[6] A year later, from his home in Australia, the modernist promoter Lucian Boz headlined a selection of his works with Janco's portrait of the author.[176] Also in 1981, a selection of Janco's drawings of Holocaust crimes was issued with the Am Oved album Kav Haketz/On the Edge.[6] The following year, he received the "Worthy of Tel Aviv" distinction, granted by the city government.[159] One of the last public events to be attended by Marcel Janco was the creation of the Janco-Dada Museum at his home in Ein Hod.[71][146][148][168][170] By then, Janco is said to have been concerned about the overall benefits of Jewish relocation into an Arab village.[177] Among his final appearances in public was a 1984 interview with Schweizer Fernsehen station, in which he revisited his Dada activities.[26] Work[edit] From Iser's Postimpressionism to Expressionist Dada[edit] The earliest works by Janco show the influence of Iosif Iser, adopting the visual trappings of Postimpressionism and illustrating, for the first time in Janco's career, the interest in modern composition techniques;[178] Liana Saxone-Horodi believes that Iser's manner is most evident in Janco's 1911 work, Self-portrait with Hat, preserved at the Janco-Dada Museum.[168] Around 1913, Janco was in more direct contact with the French sources of Iser's Postimpressionism, having by then discovered on his own the work of André Derain.[15] However, his covers and vignettes for Simbolul are generally Art Nouveau and Symbolist to the point of pastiche. Researcher Tom Sandqvist presumes that Janco was in effect following his friends' command, as "his own preferences were soon closer to Cézanne and cubist-influenced modes of expression".[179] Futurism was thrown into the mix, a fact acknowledged by Janco during his 1930 encounter with Marinetti: "we were nourished by [Futurist] ideas and empowered to be enthusiastic."[22] A third major source for Janco's imagery was Expressionism, initially coming to him from both Die Brücke artists and Oskar Kokoschka,[180] and later reactivated by his contacts at Der Sturm.[65] Among his early canvasses, the self-portraits and the portraits of clowns have been discussed as particularly notable samples of Romanian Expressionism.[181] The influence of Germanic Postimpressionism on Janco's art was crystallized during his studies at the Federal Institute of Technology. His more important teachers there, Sandqvist observes, were sculptor Johann Jakob Graf and architect Karl Moser—the latter in particular, for his ideas on the architectural Gesamtkunstwerk. Sandqvist suggests that, after modernizing Moser's ideas, Janco first theorized that Abstract-Expressionistic decorations needed to an integral part of the basic architectural design.[182] In paintings from Janco's Cabaret Voltaire period, the figurative element is not canceled, but usually subdued: the works show a mix of influences, primarily from Cubism or Futurism, and have been described by Janco's colleague Arp as "zigzag naturalism".[183] His series on dancers, painted before 1917 and housed by the Israel Museum, moves between the atmospheric qualities of a Futurism filtered through Dada and Janco's first experiments in purely abstract art.[184] His assimilation of Expressionism has led scholar John Willett to discuss Dadaism as visually an Expressionist sub-current,[185] and, in retrospect, Janco himself claimed that Dada was not as much a fully-fledged new artistic style as "a force coming from the physical instincts", directed against "everything cheap".[186] However, his own work also features the quintessentially Dada found art, or everyday objects rearranged as art—reportedly, he was the first Dadaist to experiment in such manner.[187] His other studies, in collage and relief, have been described by reviewers as "a personal synthesis which is identifiable as his own to this day",[188] and ranked among "the most courageous and original experiments in abstract art."[71] The Contimporanul years were a period of artistic exploration. Although a Constructivist architect and designer, Janco was still identifiable as an Expressionist in his ink-drawn portraits of writers and in some of his canvasses. According to scholar Dan Grigorescu, his essays of the time fluctuate away from Constructivism, and adopt ideas common in Expressionism, Surrealism, or even the Byzantine revival suggested by anti-modernist reviews.[189] His Rolling the Dice piece is a meditation on the tragedy of human existence, which reinterprets the symbolism of zodiacs[190] and probably alludes to the seedier side of urban life.[191] The Expressionist transfiguration of shapes was especially noted in his drawings of Mateiu Caragiale and Stephan Roll, created from harsh and seemingly spontaneous lines.[180] The style was ridiculed at the time by traditionalist poet George Topîrceanu, who wrote that, in Antologia poeților de azi, Ion Barbu looked "a Mongolian bandit", Felix Aderca "a shoemaker's apprentice", and Alice Călugăru "an alcoholic fishwife".[105] Such views were contrasted by Perpessicius' publicized belief that Janco was "the purest artist", his drawings evidencing the "great vital force" of his subjects.[192] Topîrceanu's claim is contradicted by literary historian Barbu Cioculescu, who finds the Antologiadrawings: "exquisitely synthetic—some of them masterpieces; take it from someone who has seen from up close many of the writers portrayed".[193] Primitive and collective art[edit] As a Dada, Janco was interested in the raw and primitive art, generated by "the instinctive power of creation", and he credited Paul Klee with having helped him "interpret the soul of primitive man".[39][194] A distinct application of Dada was his own work with masks, seen by Hugo Ball as having generated fascination with their unusual "kinetic power", and useful for performing "larger-than-life characters and passions."[195] However, Janco's understanding of African masks, idols and ritual was, according to art historians Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, "deeply romanticized" and "reductive".[196] At the end of the Dada episode, Janco also took his growing interest in primitivism to the level of academia: in his 1918 speech at the Zurich Institute, he declared that African, Etruscan, Byzantine and Romanesque arts were more genuine and "spiritual" than the Renaissance and its derivatives, while also issuing special praise for the modern spirituality of Derain, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; his lecture rated all Cubists above all Impressionists.[197] In his contribution to Das Neue Leben theory, he spoke about a return to the handicrafts, ending the "divorce" between art and life.[198] Art critic Harry Seiwert also notes that Janco's art also reflected his contact with various other alternative models, found in Ancient Egyptian and Far Eastern art, in the paintings of Cimabue and El Greco, and in Cloisonnism.[199] Seiwert and Sandqvist both propose that Janco's work had other enduring connections with the visual conventions of Hassidism and the dark tones often favored by 20th-century Jewish art.[200] Around 1919, Janco had come to describe Constructivism as a needed transition from "negative" Dada, an idea also pioneered by his colleagues Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg, and finding an early expression in Janco's plaster relief Soleil jardin clair (1918).[201] In part, Janco's post-Dadaism responded to the socialist ideals of Constructivism. According to Sandqvist, his affiliation to Das Neue Leben and his sporadic contacts with the Art Soviet of Munich meant that he was trying to "adjust to the spirit of the age."[202] Historian Hubert F. van der Berg also notes that the socialist ideal of "a new life", implicitly adopted by Janco, was a natural peacetime development of Dada's discourse about "the new man".[203] The activity at Contimporanul cemented Janco's belief in primitivism and the values of outsider art. In a 1924 piece, he argued: "The art of children, folk art, the art of psychopaths, of primitive people are the liveliest ones, the most expressive ones, coming to us from organic depths, without cultivated beauty."[204] He ridiculed, like Ion Vinea before him, the substance of Romania's academic traditionalism, notably in a provocative drawing which showed a grazing donkey under the title "Tradition".[205]Instead, Janco was publicizing the idea that Dada and various other strands of modernism were the actual tradition, for being indirectly indebted to the absurdist nature of Romanian folklore.[206] The matter of Janco's own debt to his country's peasant art is more controversial. In the 1920s, Vinea discussed Janco's Cubism is a direct echo of an old abstract art that is supposedly native and exclusive to Romania—an assumption considered exaggerated by Paul Cernat.[207] Seiwert suggests that virtually none of Janco's paintings show a verifiable contact with Romanian primitivism, but his opinion is questioned by Sandqvist: he writes that Janco's masks and prints are homages to traditional Romanian decorative patterns.[208] Beyond Constructivism[edit] For a while, Janco rediscovered himself in abstract and semi-abstract art, describing the basic geometrical shapes as pure forms, and art as the effort to organize these forms—ideas akin with the "picto-poetry" of Romanian avant-garde writers such as Ilarie Voronca.[209] After 1930, when Constructivism lost its position of leadership on Romania's artistic scene,[84][210] Janco made a return to "analytic" Cubism, echoing the early work of Picasso in his painting Peasant Woman and Eggs.[180] This period centered on various semi-figurative cityscapes, which, according to critics such as Alexandru D. Broșteanu[77] and Sorin Alexandrescu,[211] stand out for their objectification of the human figure. Also then, Janco worked on seascape and still life canvasses, in brown tones and Cubist arrangements.[168]Diversification touched his other activities. His theory of set design still mixed Expressionism into Futurism and Constructivism, calling for an actor-based Expressionist theater and a mechanized, movement-based, cinema.[212] However, his parallel work in costume design evidenced a toning down of avant-garde tendencies (to the displeasure of his colleagues at Integral magazine), and a growing preoccupation with commedia dell'arte.[213] In discussing architecture, Janco described himself and the other Artistes Radicaux as the mentors of Europe's modernist urban planners, including Bruno Taut and the Bauhaus group.[214] The ideals of collectivism in art, "art as life", and a "Constructivist revolution" dominated his programmatic texts of the mid-1920s, which offered as examples the activism of De Stijl, Blok and Soviet Constructivist architecture.[215] His own architectural work was entirely dedicated to functionalism: in his words, the purpose of architecture was a "harmony of forms", with designs as simplified as to resemble crystals.[216] His experiment on Trinității Street, with its angular pattern and multicolored facade, has been rated one of the most spectacular samples of Romanian modernism,[71] while the buildings he designed later came with Art Decoelements, including the "ocean liner"-type balconies.[175] At the other end, his Predeal sanatorium was described by Sandqvist as "a long, narrow white building clearly signaling its function as a hospital" and "smoothly adapting to the landscape."[109] Functionalism was further illustrated by Janco's ideas on furniture design, where he favored "small heights", "simple aesthetics", as well as "a maximum of comfort"[217] which would "pay no tribute to richness".[71] Scholars have also noted that "the breath of humanitarianism" unites the work of Janco, Maxy and Corneliu Michăilescu, beyond their shared eclecticism.[218] Cernat nevertheless suggests that the Contimporanul group was politically disengaged and making efforts to separate art from politics, giving positive coverage to both Marxism and Italian fascism.[219] In that context, a more evidently Marxist form of Constructivism, close to Proletkult, was being taken up independently by Maxy.[84]Janco's functionalist goal was still coupled with socialist imagery, as in Către o arhitectură a Bucureștilor, called an architectural tikkun olam by Sandqvist.[76] Indebted to Le Corbusier's New Architecture,[220] Janco theorized that Bucharest had the "luck" of not yet being systematized or built-up, and that it could be easily turned into a garden city, without ever repeating the West's "chain of mistakes".[71] According to architecture historians Mihaela Criticos and Ana Maria Zahariade, Janco's creed was not in fact radically different from mainstream Romanian opinions: "although declaring themselves committed to the modernist agenda, [Janco and others] nuance it with their own formulas, away from the abstract utopias of the International Style."[221] A similar point is made by Sorin Alexandrescu, who attested a "general contradiction" in Janco's architecture, that between Janco's own wishes and those of his patrons.[211] Holocaust art and Israeli abstractionism[edit] Soon after his first visit to Palestine and his Zionist conversion, Janco began painting landscapes in optimistic tones, including a general view over Tiberias[168] and bucolic watercolors.[170] By the time of World War II, however, he was again an Expressionist, fascinated with the major existential themes. The war experience inspired his 1945 painting Fascist Genocide, which is also seen by Grigorescu as one of his contributions to Expressionism.[222] Janco's sketches of the Bucharest Pogrom are, according to cultural historian David G. Roskies, "extraordinary" and in complete break with Janco's "earlier surrealistic style"; he paraphrases the rationale for this change as: "Why bother with surrealism when the world itself has gone crazy?"[153] According to the painter's own definition: "I was drawing with the thirst of one who is being chased around, desperate to quench it and find his refuge."[6] As he recalled, these works were not well received in the post-war Zionistcommunity, because they evoked painful memories in a general mood of optimism; as a result, Janco decided to change his palette and tackle subjects which related exclusively to his new country.[223] An exception to this self-imposed rule was the motif of "wounded soldiers", which continued to preoccupy him after 1948, and was also thematically linked to the wartime massacres.[224] During and after his Ofakim Hadashim engagement, Marcel Janco again moved into the realm of pure abstraction, which he believed represented the artistic "language" of a new age.[225] This was an older idea, as first illustrated by his 1925 attempt to create an "alphabet of shapes", the basis for any abstractionist composition.[84] His subsequent preoccupations were linked to the Jewish tradition of interpreting symbols, and he reportedly told scholar Moshe Idel: "I paint in Kabbalah".[226] He was still eclectic beyond abstractionism, and made frequent returns to brightly colored, semi-figurative, landscapes.[168] Also eclectic is Janco's sparse contribution to the architecture of Israel, including a Herzliya Pituah villa that is entirely built in the non-modernist Poble Espanyol style.[160] Another component of Janco's work was his revisiting of earlier Dada experiments: he redid some of his Dada masks,[168] and supported the international avant-garde group NO!art.[227] He later worked on the Imaginary Animals cycle of paintings, inspired by the short stories of Urmuz.[168][209] Meanwhile, his Ein Hod project was in various ways the culmination of his promotion of folk art, and, in Janco's own definition, "my last Dada activity".[198] According to some interpretations, he may have been directly following the example of Hans Arp's "Waggis" commune, which existed in 1920s Switzerland.[55][148] Anthropologist Susan Slyomovics argues that the Ein Hod project as a whole was an alternative to the standard practice of Zionist colonization, since, instead of creating new buildings in the ancient scenery, it showed attempts to cultivate the existing Arab-style masonry.[228] She also writes that Janco's landscapes of the place "romanticize" his own contact with the Palestinians, and that they fail to clarify whether he thought of Arabs as refugees or as fellow inhabitants.[229] Journalist Esther Zanberg describes Janco as an "Orientalist" driven by "the mythology surrounding Israeli nationalistic Zionism."[160] Art historian Nissim Gal also concludes: "the pastoral vision of Janco [does not] include any trace of the inhabitants of the former Arab village".[167] Legacy[edit] The Janco-Dada Museum, with residents' artwork and fragment of the Berlin Wall Admired by his contemporaries on the avant-garde scene, Marcel Janco is mentioned or portrayed in several works by Romanian authors. In the 1910s, Vinea dedicated him the poem "Tuzla", which is one of his first contributions to modernist literature;[230] a decade later, one of the Janco exhibits inspired him to write the prose poem Danțul pe frânghie ("Dancing on a Wire").[231] Following his conflict with the painter, Tzara struck out all similar dedications from his own poems.[55] Before their friendship waned, Ion Barbu also contributed a homage to Janco, referring to his Constructivist paintings as "storms of protractors".[120] In addition, Janco was dedicated a poem by Belgian artist Émile Malespine, and is mentioned in one of Marinetti's poetic texts about the 1930 visit to Romania,[232] as well as in the verse of neo-Dadaist Valery Oisteanu.[233] Janco's portrait was painted by colleague Victor Brauner, in 1924.[120] According to Sandqvist, there are three competing aspects in Janco's legacy, which relate to the complexity of his profile: "In Western cultural history Marcel Janco is best known as one of the founding members of Dada in Zurich in 1916. Regarding the Romanian avant-garde in the interwar period Marcel Hermann Iancu is more known as the spider in the web and as the designer of a great number of Romania's first constructivist buildings [...]. On the other hand, in Israel Marcel Janco is best known as the 'father' of the artists' colony of Ein Hod [...] and for his pedagogic achievements in the young Jewish state."[234] Janco's memory is principally maintained by his Ein Hod museum. The building was damaged by the 2010 forest fire, but reopened and grew to include a permanent exhibit of Janco's art.[168] Janco's paintings still have a measurable impact on the contemporary Israeli avant-garde, which is largely divided between the abstractionism he helped introduce and the neorealistic disciples of Michail Grobman and Avraham Ofek.[235] The Romanian communist regime, which cracked down on modernism, reconfirmed the confiscation of villas built by the Birou de Studii Moderne, which it then leased to other families.[71][130] One of these lodgings, the Wexler Villa, was assigned as the residence of communist poet Eugen Jebeleanu.[130][236] The regime tended to ignore Janco's contributions, which were not listed in the architectural who's who,[237] and it became standard practice to generally omit references to his Jewish ethnicity.[6] He was however honored with a special issue of Secolul 20 literary magazine, in 1979,[148] and interviewed for Tribuna and Luceafărul journals (1981, 1984).[238] His architectural legacy was affected by the large-scale demolition program of the 1980s. Most of the buildings were spared, however, because they are scattered throughout residential Bucharest.[175] Some 20 of his Bucharest structures were still standing twenty years later,[237] but the lack of a renovation program and the shortages of late communism brought steady decay.[71][160][175][237] After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Marcel Janco's buildings were subject to legal battles, as the original owners and their descendants were allowed to contest the nationalization.[71] These landmarks, like other modernist assets, became treasured real estate: in 1996, a Janco house was valued at 500,000 United States dollars.[175] The sale of such property happened at a fast pace, reportedly surpassing the standardized conservation effort, and experts noted with alarm that Janco villas were being defaced with anachronistic additions, such as insulated glazing[237][239] and structural interventions,[130] or eclipsed by the newer highrise.[240] In 2008, despite calls from within the academic community, only three of his buildings had been inscribed in the National Register of Historic Monuments.[237] Janco was again being referenced as a possible model for new generations of Romanian architects and urban planners. In a 2011 article, poet and architect August Ioan claimed: "Romanian architecture is, apart from its few years with Marcel Janco, one that has denied itself experimentation, projective thinking, anticipation. [...] it is content with imports, copies, nuances or pure and simple stagnation."[241] This stance is contrasted by that of designer Radu Comșa, who argues that praise for Janco often lacks "the recoil of objectivity".[157] Janco's programmatic texts on the issue were collected and reviewed by historian Andrei Pippidi in the 2003 retrospective anthology București – Istorie și urbanism ("Bucharest. History and Urban Planning").[242] Following a proposal formulated by poet and publicist Nicolae Tzone at the Bucharest Conference on Surrealism, in 2001,[243] Janco's sketch for Vinea's "country workshop" was used in designing Bucharest's ICARE, the Institute for the Study of the Romanian and European Avant-garde.[244] The Bazaltin building was used as the offices of TVR Cultural station.[237] In the realm of visual arts, curators Anca Bocăneț and Dana Herbay organized a centennial Marcel Janco exhibit at the Bucharest Museum of Art (MNAR),[245] with additional contributions from writer Magda Cârneci.[175] In 2000, his work was featured in the "Jewish Art of Romania" retrospective, hosted by Cotroceni Palace.[246]The local art market rediscovered Janco's art, and, in June 2009, one of his seascapes sold in auction for 130,000 Euro, the second largest sum ever fetched by a painting in Romania.[247] There was a noted increase in his overall market value,[248] and he became interesting to art forgers.[249] Outside Romania, Janco's work has been reviewed in specialized monographs by Harry Seiwert (1993)[250] and Michael Ilk (2001).[120][251] His work as painter and sculptor has been dedicated special exhibits in Berlin,[120] Essen (Museum Folkwang) and Budapest,[251] while his architecture was presented abroad with exhibitions at the Technical University Munich and Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv.[160] Among the events showcasing Janco's art, some focused exclusively on his rediscovered Holocaust paintings and drawings. These shows include On the Edge (Yad Vashem, 1990)[6] and Destine la răscruce ("Destinies at Crossroads", MNAR, 2011).[252] His canvasses and collages went on sale at Bonhams[170] and Sotheby's.[188] ***** The Holocaust,[b] also referred to as the Shoah,[c] was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its World War II collaborators killed some six million European Jews. The victims included 1.5 million children and constituted about two-thirds of the nine million Jews in Continental Europe. A broader definition of the Holocaust includes the killing of the Roma and the "incurably sick". An even broader definition includes ethnic Poles, other Slavic ethnic groups, Soviet citizens and prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, black people, and political opponents. From 1941 to 1945, Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered Jews as part of a larger event that included the persecution of other peoples in Europe. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and execution of the mass murder. Killings were committed throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany itself, and across all territories controlled by the Axis powers. Over 42,000 camps, ghettos, and other detention sites were established.[6] Germany implemented the persecution in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination termed the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 depriving them of citizenship rights. Starting in 1933 the Nazis built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and people deemed "undesirable". After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews from the local population and remove them from the Greater Germanic Reich. In 1941, as German forces captured huge territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings in less than a year. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from the ghettos in sealed freight trains to extermination camps fitted with gas chambers. Thousands did not survive the journey. Jewish resistance, although severely limited in terms of resources, was offered in over 100 locations, most notably during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. Millions of Jews, Soviet POWs, Roma, and others died in the camps. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945. Part of a series on The Holocaust Responsibility[show] Early policies[show] Victims[show] Ghettos[show] Atrocities[show] Camps[show] Resistance[show] Allied response[show] Aftermath[show] Lists[show] Resources[show] Remembrance[show] vte Contents  [hide]  1 Terminology 2 Distinctive features 2.1 Genocidal state 2.2 Ideology and scale 2.3 Industrialized murder 2.4 Medical experiments 3 Origins 3.1 Antisemitism and racism 3.2 Germany after World War I 3.3 Hitler's world view 4 Rise of Nazi Germany 4.1 Dictatorship and repression (1933–1939) 4.2 Nuremberg Laws 4.3 Emigration 4.4 Kristallnacht 4.5 Territorial solution and resettlement 5 World War II 5.1 German-occupied Poland 5.2 Other occupied countries 5.3 Germany's allies 5.4 Concentration and labor camps 5.5 Ghettos 5.6 Pogroms 5.7 Death squads 5.8 Gas vans 6 Final Solution 6.1 Wannsee Conference 6.2 Extermination camps 6.3 Gas chambers 6.4 Jewish resistance 6.5 Flow of information from the camps 6.6 Climax, holocaust in Hungary 6.7 Death marches 6.8 Liberation 7 Responses to the Holocaust 7.1 Perpetrator's motivations 7.2 German public 8 Victims and death toll 8.1 Jews 8.2 Roma 8.3 Disabled and mentally ill 8.4 Slavs 8.5 Political opponents 8.6 Gay men 8.7 Persons of color 8.8 Jehovah's Witnesses 9 Aftermath 9.1 Trials 9.2 Reparations 9.3 Uniqueness question 10 See also 11 Notes 12 Citations 13 References 14 Further reading Terminology Main article: Names of the Holocaust The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókaustos, which refers to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt.[d] Later it came to denote large-scale destruction or slaughter.[7][9] The biblical term shoah (שואה; also transliterated sho'ah and shoa), meaning "destruction", became the standard Hebrew term, first used in a pamphlet in 1940, for the murder of the European Jews.[10][11][e] The term Holocaust was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of shoah,[4] and in 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)".[13] The NBC television mini-series Holocaust (1978) is credited with having helped to popularize the term in the United States.[14] As accounts of the Holocaust expanded to include non-Jewish victims, shoah retained its meaning as the Nazi genocide of the Jews.[15] The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (die Endlösung der Judenfrage).[16] In Teaching the Holocaust (2015), Michael Gray offers three definitions of the Holocaust. The first refers to the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945; this definition views, for example, the events of Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938 as an early phase of the Holocaust. The second focuses on the systematic mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1941 and 1945; this acknowledges the shift in German policy in 1941 toward the extermination of the Jewish people. The third and broadest definition embraces the persecution and murder of several groups by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945; this includes all the Nazis' victims, but it fails, Gray writes, to acknowledge that only the Jewish people were singled out for annihilation.[2][f] Groups included in the broader definitions, according to Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000), are the Roma; the Aktion T4 "incurably sick"; Soviet POWs; Soviet citizens and ethnic Poles who died because of poor conditions in occupied territories; homosexuals; and Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious dissenters.[27] The authors favour a definition that focuses on the Jews, Roma, and Aktion T4 victims: "the systematic, state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity. This applied to Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped."[20] Distinctive features Genocidal state Territories of the Axis Powers, olive green. Ghettos were established in which Jews were confined before they were shipped off to extermination camps. Every arm of Nazi Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, called "a genocidal state". Bureaucrats were involved in identifying who was a Jew, confiscating property, and scheduling trains that deported Jews. Companies fired Jewish employees and later employed Jews as slave labour. Universities dismissed Jewish students and faculty. German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; other companies built the crematoria.[28] As prisoners entered the death camps, they were ordered to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before it was sent to Germany to be reused or recycled.[29] Through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims.[30] Saul Friedländer writes: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews." Some Christian churches "declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point". He argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because antisemitic policies were able to "unfold to their most extreme levels without the interference of any major countervailing interests".[31] Ideology and scale Yehuda Bauer argued in 2002 that other genocides have had some apparently pragmatic basis, such as a battle for territory, whereas the Holocaust was purely ideological, "rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology—which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."[32] Map showing the extermination and concentration camps Völkisch mysticism, pseudoscience and ethnonationalism were combined, writes David Bloxham, "in a terrifying agenda for unmixing the peoples under German dominion and breeding a race 'worthy' of European mastery". While other groups—the Roma, German blacks, the disabled, and "hereditary criminals"—were viewed as inferior and targeted by Nazi euthanasia and sterilization policies, the Nazis saw the Jews as an "anti-race", writes Bloxham, "a parasitical, polluting people".[33] Eberhard Jäckel writes that it was the first time a state had thrown its power behind the idea that an entire people should be wiped out, without exception and as quickly as possible.[g] Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated.[35] The Nazis' "desire to be comprehensive and make no exceptions, anywhere" distinguished their racial war from all others, according to Richard J. Evans.[36] The killings were systematically conducted in virtually all areas of German-occupied territory in more than 20 occupied countries.[37] Close to 3 million Jews in occupied Poland and between 700,000 and 2.5 million Jews in the Soviet Union were killed. Hundreds of thousands more Jews died in the rest of German-occupied Europe.[38] Discussions at the Wannsee Conference make it clear that the German "final solution of the Jewish question" included Britain and all the neutral states in Europe, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain.[39] Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators.[40] Without the help of local collaborators, the Germans would not have been able to extend the Holocaust across most of Europe.[41] Industrialized murder Further information: List of Nazi concentration camps The use of extermination camps equipped with gas chambers was unprecedented.[42] These stationary facilities to which victims were transported by rail from all over Europe grew out of Nazi experiments with poison gas during the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme against the disabled and mentally ill, which began in 1939.[43] The Germans set up six extermination camps in occupied Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau (established October 1941); Majdanek (October 1941); Chełmno (December 1941); and in 1942 the three Operation Reinhard camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.[44][45] Medical experiments Main article: Nazi human experimentation The SS's medical experiments on Jewish and non-Jewish camp inmates were another feature. [46] The most notorious of these physicians was Josef Mengele, who would pick out new subjects during "selection" on the ramp at Auschwitz. Keen to experiment on twins, he would shout "Zwillinge heraus!" (twins step forward).[47] His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change their eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and amputations and other surgeries.[48][h] Other experiments took place at Buchenwald, Dachau, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and elsewhere. Some dealt with sterilization of men and women, the treatment of war wounds, ways to counteract chemical weapons, research into new vaccines and drugs, and survival of harsh conditions. At least 7000, and likely more, prisoners were subjected to these experiments, and most died either during them or afterwards.[50] Origins Antisemitism and racism See also: History of the Jews in Germany, Christianity and antisemitism, Martin Luther and antisemitism, Religious antisemitism, and Racial antisemitism Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. Even after the Reformation, Catholicism and Lutheranism continued to persecute Jews, accusing them of blood libels and subjecting them to pogroms and expulsions.[51][52] The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence in the German empire and Austria-Hungary of the Völkisch movement, which was developed by such thinkers as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde. The movement embraced a pseudo-scientific racism that viewed Jews as a race whose members were locked in mortal combat with the Aryan race for world domination.[53] These ideas became commonplace throughout the Germany[54], with the professional classes adopting an ideology that did not see humans as racial equals with equal hereditary value.[55] Although the völkisch parties had support in elections at first, by 1914 they were no longer influential. This did not mean that antisemitism had disappeared; instead it was incorporated into the platforms of several mainstream political parties.[54] Germany after World War I Further information: Treaty of Versailles The political situation in Germany and elsewhere in Europe after World War I (1914–1918) contributed to the rise of virulent antisemitism. Many Germans did not accept that their country had been defeated, giving rise to the stab-in-the-back myth. This insinuated that it was disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and communists, who had orchestrated Germany's surrender. Inflaming the anti-Jewish sentiment was the apparent overrepresentation of ethnic Jews in the leadership of communist revolutionary governments in Europe, such as Ernst Toller, head of a short-lived revolutionary government in Bavaria. This perception contributed to the canard of Jewish Bolshevism.[56] The economic strains of the Great Depression led some in the German medical establishment to advocate the euthanasia of the "incurable" mentally and physically disabled as a cost-saving measure to free up funds for the curable.[57] By the time the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party, came to power in 1933, there was already a tendency to seek to save the racially "valuable" while ridding society of the racially "undesirable".[58] The party had originated in 1920[59][i] as an offshoot of the völkisch movement, and it adopted that movement's form of antisemitism.[60] Early antisemites in the party included Alfred Rosenberg, who in the 1920s wrote antisemitic articles in the Völkischer Beobachter, and Dietrich Eckart, that newspaper's publisher. Rosenberg's vision of a secretive Jewish conspiracy ruling the world would influence Hitler's views of Jews by making them the driving force behind communism.[61] Hitler's world view The origin and first expression of Hitler's antisemitism remain a matter of debate.[62] Central to his world view was the idea of expansion and lebensraum (living space) for Germany.[63] Open about his hatred of Jews, he subscribed to most of the common antisemitic stereotypes.[64] From the early 1920s onwards, he linked the Jews with germs and said they should be dealt with in the same way. He viewed Marxism as a Jewish doctrine, said he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism", and believed that Jews had created communism as part of a conspiracy to destroy Germany.[65] In the 1920s, the journalist Joseph Hell claimed that in response to being asked what he would do to the Jews once he gained power, Hitler said that his "first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews".[66] Rise of Nazi Germany Dictatorship and repression (1933–1939) Further information: Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany, Racial policy of Nazi Germany, Haavara Agreement, and Jews escaping from German-occupied Europe to the United Kingdom With the establishment of the Third Reich, German leaders proclaimed the rebirth of the "people's community" of solidarity against internal and external enemies (Volksgemeinschaft).[67] Nazi German policies divided the population into two categories, the "national comrades" (Volksgenossen) who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft, and the "community aliens" (Gemeinschaftsfremde) who did not. The enemies were divided into three main groups of people, the "racial" enemies such as the Jews and the Romani people viewed as "blood" enemies; political opponents of Nazism such as Marxists, liberals, Christians and the "reactionaries" viewed as wayward "national comrades"; and moral opponents such as homosexuals, the "work-shy", and habitual criminals, who were also seen as wayward "national comrades". The last two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for "re-education", with the aim of eventual absorption into the Volksgemeinschaft. "Racial" enemies such as the Jews could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be totally removed from society.[68] Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses: SAtroopers urge a national boycott outside Israel's Department Store in Berlin, 1 April 1933. All signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews."[69] Leading up to the March 1933 Reichstag elections and after it, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against their opponents.[70] They set up concentration camps for the extrajudicial imprisonment of their opponents.[71] One of the first, at Dachau, opened on 9 March 1933.[72] Initially the camp primarily contained Communists and Social Democrats.[73] Other early prisons were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS.[74] The initial purpose of the camps was to serve as a deterrent by terrorizing those Germans who did not conform to social norms.[75] Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted.[76] On 1 April 1933, a boycott of Jewish businesses occurred.[77] On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Servicewas passed which excluded all Jews and other "non-Aryans" from the civil service.[78] Jewish lawyers were disbarred.[79]Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities,[78] from belonging to the Journalists' Association, and from being owners or editors of newspapers.[76] Jewish businesses were also targeted for either closure or "Aryanisation", the forcible sale to Germans. Of the approximately 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany in 1933, only about 7,000 were still Jewish-owned in April 1939. Accompanying the removal of the Jews from economic life, they were also gradually restricted from most social activities and public areas.[80] Works by Jewish composers,[81] Jewish authors,[82] and Jewish artists were excluded from publications, performances, or exhibitions.[83] Nuremberg Laws In September 1935, Hitler introduced the three Nuremberg Laws,[84] which prohibited Germans and those of "kindred blood"[85] from having sexual relations with or marrying Jews[86] or Romanis.[87] The laws also stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights.[88][j] At the same time the German government used propaganda to justify the need for a restrictive law,[90] grouping these "crimes" under the concept of Rassenschande (racial shame).[91] Difficulties arose over the precise definition of who was a Jew and what to do with the offspring and descendants of earlier mixed marriages.[92] Emigration Nazi racial policy was aimed at forcing Jews to emigrate.[93] Fifty thousand German Jews left Germany by the end of 1934,[94] and by the end of 1938, approximately half the German Jewish population had left the country.[93] Among the prominent Jews who left was the conductor Bruno Walter, who fled after being told that the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic would be burned down if he conducted a concert there.[95] Albert Einstein, who was abroad when Hitler came to power, never returned to Germany. He was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and his citizenship was revoked.[96] Other Jewish scientists, including Gustav Hertz and Erwin Schrödinger, lost their teaching positions and left the country.[97] In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, which exposed the Jews of Austria to German antisemitism. Austrian Nazis broke into Jewish shops, stole from Jewish homes and businesses, and forced Jews to perform humiliating acts such as scrubbing the streets or cleaning toilets.[98] Jewish businesses were "Aryanised" and all of the legal restrictions on Jews in Germany were imposed upon Austrian Jews.[99] In August Adolf Eichmann was put in charge of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, which centralised the process of emigration and led about 100,000 Austrian Jews to leave the country by May 1939.[100] Kristallnacht Main article: Kristallnacht The synagogue in Siegen burning, 10 November 1938. On 7 November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew and illegal immigrant, shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German Embassy in Paris, in retaliation for the expulsion of his parents and siblings from Germany.[101][k] When vom Rath died on 9 November, the government used his death as a pretext to instigate a pogrom against the Jews throughout the Third Reich. The government claimed it was spontaneous, but in fact it had been ordered and planned by Hitler and Goebbels, although with no clear goals, according to David Cesarani; the result, he writes, was "murder, rape, looting, destruction of property, and terror on an unprecedented scale".[103][104] Known as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"), the attacks were partly carried out by the SS and SA,[105] but ordinary Germans joined in; in some areas the violence began before the SS or SA arrived.[106] Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) had been looted and attacked, and over 1,000 synagogues damaged or destroyed. Groups of Jews were forced by the crowd to watch their burning synagogues; in Bensheim they were forced to dance around it and in Laupheim to kneel before it.[107] At least 90 Jews died. The damage was estimated at 39 million Reichmarks.[108] Cesarani writes that "[t]he extent of the desolation stunned the population and rocked the regime."[103] Thirty-thousand Jews were sent to the Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.[109] Many were released within weeks; by early 1939, 2,000 remained in the camps.[110] German Jewry was made collectively responsible for restitution of the damage resulting from the pogrom; they also had to pay an "atonement tax" of over a billion Reichsmarks. Insurance payments for damage to their property were confiscated by the government. A decree on 12 November barred Jews from most of the remaining occupations they had been allowed to hold.[111] Kristallnacht marked the end of any sort of public Jewish activity and culture, and Jews stepped up their efforts to leave the country.[112] Territorial solution and resettlement Further information: Madagascar Plan Before World War II, Germany considered mass deportation from Europe of German, and later European, Jewry.[113] Among the areas considered for possible resettlement were British Palestine,[114] and French Madagascar.[115] After the war began, German leaders considered deporting Europe's Jews to Siberia.[116][117]Palestine was the only location to which any German relocation plan produced results, via the Haavara Agreement between the Zionist Federation of Germany and the German government.[118] This resulted in the transfer of about 60,000 German Jews and $100 million from Germany to Palestine, but it ended with the outbreak of World War II.[119] In May 1940, Madagascar became the focus of new deportation efforts[115] because it had unfavorable living conditions that would hasten deaths.[120] Several German leaders had discussed the idea in 1938, and Adolf Eichmann's office was ordered to carry out resettlement planning, but no evidence of planning exists until after the fall of France in June 1940.[121] But the inability to defeat Britain prevented the movement of Jews across the seas,[122] and the end of the Madagascar Plan was announced on 10 February 1942.[123] World War II Main article: History of the Jews during World War II German-occupied Poland Further information: Invasion of Poland, Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), History of the Jews in Poland, Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland, and General Government Main article: The Holocaust in Poland Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, and the USSR, with General Government territory in yellow, 1939–1941 When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, it gained control of about 2 million Jews in the occupied territory. The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which had control of the rest of Poland's pre-war population of 3.3–3.5 million Jews.[124] German plans for Poland included expelling gentile Poles from large areas, confining Jews, and settling Germans on the emptied lands. To help the process along, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, ordered that the "leadership class" in Poland be killed and the Jews expelled from the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany.[125] The Germans initiated a policy of sending Jews from all territories they had recently annexed (Austria, Czechoslovakia, and western Poland) to the central section of Poland, which they called the General Government. There the Jews were concentrated in ghettos in major cities,[126] chosen for their railway lines to facilitate later deportation.[127] Food supplies were restricted, public hygiene was difficult, and the inhabitants were often subjected to forced labour.[128] In the labour camps and ghettos at least half a million Jews died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions.[129] Jeremy Blackwrites that the ghettos were not intended, in 1939, as a step towards the extermination of the Jews. Instead, they were viewed as part of a policy of creating a territorial reservation to contain them.[130] Lublin Reservation Main article: Lublin Reservation After the invasion of Poland, the Germans planned to set up a Jewish reservation in a transit camp in Nisko in southeast Poland, but the "Nisko Plan" failed, in part because it was opposed by Hans Frank, the new Governor-General of the General Government territory.[130][131][132] Adolf Eichmann was assigned to remove Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the reservation.[133] Although the idea was to remove 80,000 Jews, Eichmann had managed to send only 4,700 by March 1940, and the plan was abandoned in April.[134] By mid-October the idea of a Jewish reservation had been revived by Heinrich Himmler, because of the influx of Germanic settlers into the Warthegau.[135] Resettlement continued until January 1941 under Odilo Globocnik,[136] and included both Jews and Poles.[137] By that time 95,000 Jews were already concentrated in the area,[138] but the plan to deport up to 600,000 additional Jews to the Lublin reservation failed for logistical and political reasons.[139] Other occupied countries See also: The Holocaust in Norway, Rescue of the Danish Jews, The Holocaust in Belgium, The Holocaust in Luxembourg, The Holocaust in France, The Holocaust in Serbia, The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia, and The Holocaust in Italian Libya German passport stamped with a "J"; this passport was used to escape Europe in 1940 Germany invaded Norway in April 1940. The country was completely occupied by June.[140] There were about 1,800 Jews in Norway, persecuted by the Norwegian Nazis. In late 1940, the Jews were banned from some occupations and in 1941 all Jews had to register their property with the government.[141] Also in 1940, Germany invaded Denmark.[140] The country was overrun so quickly that there was no chance of organizing resistance. Consequently, the Danish government stayed in power and the Germans found it easier to work through it. Because of this, few measures were taken against the Danish Jews before 1942.[142] The Germans invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in May 1940. In the Netherlands, the Germans installed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reichskommissar, who quickly began to persecute the approximately 140,000 Dutch Jews. Jews were forced out of their jobs and had to register with the government. Non-Jewish Dutch citizens protested these measures and in February 1941 staged a strike that was quickly crushed.[143] After Belgium's surrender at the end of May 1940, it was ruled by a German military governor, Alexander von Falkenhausen, who enacted anti-Jewish measures against the approximately 90,000 Jews in Belgium, many of whom were refugees from Germany or Eastern Europe.[144] France had approximately 300,000 Jews, divided between the German-occupied northern part of France, and the unoccupied collaborationist southern areas under the Vichy regime. The occupied regions were under the control of a military governor, and there, anti-Jewish measures were not enacted as quickly as they were in the Vichy-controlled areas.[145] In July 1940, the Jews in the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed to Germany were expelled into Vichy France.[146] Yugoslavia and Greece were invaded in April 1941, and both countries surrendered before the end of the month. Germany and Italy divided Greece into occupation zones, but did not eliminate it as a country. Yugoslavia was dismembered, with regions in the north being annexed by Germany and regions along the coast were made part of Italy. The rest of the country was divided into a puppet state of Croatia, which was nominally an ally of Germany, and Serbia, which was governed by a combination of military and police administrators. There were approximately 80,000 Jews in Yugoslavia when it was invaded. The ruling party in Croatia, the Ustashe, not only killed Jews, but murdered and expelled Orthodox Christian Serbs and Muslims.[147] One difference between the Germans and the Croatians was the fact that the Ustashe allowed its Jewish and Serbian victims to convert to Catholicism so they could escape death. Serbia was declared free of Jews in August 1942.[148] Germany's allies Italy introduced some antisemitic measures, but there was less antisemitism there than in Germany, and Italian-occupied countries were generally safer for Jews than German-occupied territories. In some areas, the Italian authorities even tried to protect Jews, such as in the Croatian areas of the Balkans. But while Italian forces in Russia were not as vicious towards Jews as the Germans, they did not try to stop German atrocities either. There were no deportations of Italian Jews to Germany while Italy remained an ally.[149] Finland was pressured to give the Germans its Jews (who numbered around 200) in 1942, but given the opposition among the people and government, this did not happen. Eight non-Finnish Jews were deported in late 1942,[l] but that was the only case. Finnish Jews even fought in the army during the period it was allied with Germany.[150] Japan had little antisemitism in its society, and did not persecute Jews in most of the territories it controlled. Jews in Shanghai were confined, but despite German pressure, they were not killed.[151] Pulling bodies out of a death train carrying Romanian Jews from the Iași pogrom Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. Jews were forced from government service, pogroms were carried out, and by March 1941 all Jews had lost their jobs and had their property confiscated.[152] After Romania joined the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, at least 13,266 Jews were killed in the Iași pogrom,[153] and Romanian troops carried out massacres in Romanian-controlled territory, including the Odessa massacre of 20,000 Jews in Odessa in late 1941. Romania also set up concentration camps under its control in Transnistria, where 154,000–170,000 Jews were deported from 1941 to 1943.[152] Anti-Jewish measures similar to those in Germany were introduced in Slovakia, which would later deport its Jews to German concentration and extermination camps.[154] Bulgaria introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1940 and 1941, including the requirement to wear a yellow star, the banning of mixed marriages, and the loss of property. Bulgaria annexed Thrace and Macedonia, and in February 1943 agreed to deport 20,000 Jews to Treblinka. All 11,000 Jews from the annexed territories were sent to their deaths and plans were made to deport additional 6,000–8,000 Bulgarian Jews from Sofia to meet the quota.[155] When the plans became public, the Orthodox Church and many Bulgarians protested, and King Boris III cancelled the deportation of Jews native to Bulgaria.[156] Instead, they were expelled to the interior, pending further decision.[155] Although Hungary expelled Jews who were not Hungarian citizens from its newly annexed lands in 1941, it did not deport most of its Jews[157] before the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. In Budapest, nearly 80,000 Jews were killed by the Hungarian Arrow Cross battalions in late 1944.[158] Several forced labor camps for Jews were established in Italian-controlled Libya. Almost 2600 Libyan Jews were sent to camps, where 562 died.[159] Vichy France's government implemented anti-Jewish measures in French Algeria and the two French Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco.[160] Tunisia had 85,000 Jews when the Germans and Italians arrived in November 1942. An estimated 5,000 Jews were subjected to forced labor.[161] Concentration and labor camps Further information: Nazi concentration camps, List of Nazi concentration camps, and Extermination through labor The Todesstiege ("stairs of death") at the granite quarry in Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria (opened 1938); inmates were forced to carry heavy rocks up the stairs.[162] The Third Reich first used concentration camps as places of unlawful incarceration of political opponents and other "enemies of the state". Large numbers of Jews were not sent there until after Kristallnacht in November 1938.[163] Although death rates were high, the camps were not designed as killing centers.[164] After war broke out in 1939, new camps were established, some outside Germany in occupied Europe. The number of prisoners soared to around 80,000 in 1942 and 700,000 in January 1945.[citation needed] Most wartime prisoners of the camps were not Germans, but belonged to countries under German occupation.[165] It is estimated that in the occupied countries the Nazis established 30,000 slave labor camps and subcamps, almost 1,000 concentration camps, and another 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps.[166][additional citation needed] After 1942, the economic functions of the camps, previously secondary to their penal and terror functions, came to the fore. Forced labour of camp prisoners became commonplace and companies utilized their cheap labour.[163] The guards became much more brutal, and the death rate increased as the guards not only beat and starved prisoners, but killed them more frequently.[165] Extermination through labour was a policy—camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or to physical exhaustion, at which point they would be gassed or shot.[167] The Germans estimated the average prisoner's life span in a concentration camp at three months, due to lack of food and clothing, constant epidemics, and frequent punishments for the most minor transgressions.[168] The shifts were long and often involved exposure to dangerous materials.[169] Prisoner transportation between camps was often carried out in freight cars with the prisoners packed very tightly. Long delays would take place, with the prisoners confined in the cars on sidings for days.[170] In mid-1942 labor camps began requiring newly arrived prisoners to be placed in quarantine for four weeks.[171] Some camps tattooed prisoners with an identification number on arrival, but not all did.[172] Prisoners wore colored triangles on their uniforms, with the color of the triangle denoting the reason for their incarceration. Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black or green. Badges were pink for homosexuals and yellow for Jews.[173] Jews had a second yellow triangle that was worn with their original triangle, with the two forming a six-pointed star.[174][175] Ghettos Main articles: Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland, and List of Nazi-era ghettos Main ghettos: Białystok, Budapest, Kraków, Kovno, Łódź, Lvov, Riga, Vilna, Warsaw. Jews captured by Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, May 1943 After invading Poland, the Germans established ghettos in the incorporated territories and General Government to confine Jews.[126] The ghettos were formed and closed off from the outside world at different times and for different reasons.[176][177]For example, the Łódź ghetto was closed in April 1940,[126] to force the Jews inside to give up money and valuables;[178] the Warsaw ghetto was closed for health considerations (for the people outside, not inside, the ghetto),[179] but this did not happen until November 1940;[126] and the Kraków ghetto was not established until March 1941.[180] The Warsaw Ghetto contained 380,000 people[126] and was the largest ghetto in Poland; the Łódź Ghetto was the second largest,[181] holding between 160,000[182] to 223,000.[183] Because of the long drawn-out process of establishing ghettos, it is unlikely that they were originally considered part of a systematic attempt to eliminate Jews completely.[184] The Germans required each ghetto to be run by a Judenrat, or Jewish council.[185] Councils were responsible for a ghetto's day-to-day operations, including distributing food, water, heat, medical care, and shelter. The Germans also required councils to confiscate property, organize forced labor, and, finally, facilitate deportations to extermination camps.[186] The councils' basic strategy was one of trying to minimise losses, by cooperating with German authorities, bribing officials, and petitioning for better conditions or clemency.[187] Bodies of children in the Warsaw Ghetto Eventually the Germans ordered the councils to compile lists of names of deportees to be sent for "resettlement".[188] Although most ghetto councils complied with these orders,[189] many councils tried to send the least useful workers or those unable to work.[190] Leaders who refused these orders were shot. Some individuals or even complete councils committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.[191] Others, like Chaim Rumkowski, who became the "dedicated autocrat" of Łódź,[192]argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed.[193]The councils' actions in facilitating Germany's persecution and murder of ghetto inhabitants was important to the Germans.[194]When cooperation crumbled, as happened in the Warsaw ghetto after the Jewish Combat Organisation displaced the council's authority, the Germans lost control.[195] Ghettos were intended to be temporary until the Jews were deported to other locations, which never happened. Instead, the inhabitants were sent to extermination camps. The ghettos were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons serving as instruments of "slow, passive murder."[196] Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of Warsaw's population, it occupied only 2.5% of the city's area, averaging over 9 people per room.[197] Between 1940 and 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed many in the ghettos.[198] Over 43,000 Warsaw ghetto residents, or one in ten of the total population, died in 1941;[199] in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.[196] Himmler ordered the closing of ghettos in Poland in mid-July 1942, with most inhabitants going to extermination camps. Those Jews needed for war production would be confined at concentration camps.[200] The deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began on 22 July; over the almost two months of the Aktion, until 12 September, the Warsaw ghetto went from approximately 350,000 inhabitants to about 65,000. Those deported were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp.[201] Similar deportations happened in other ghettos, with many ghettos totally emptied.[202] Jewish woman chased by men and youth armed with clubs during the Lviv pogroms, July 1941, then occupied Poland, now Ukraine The first ghetto uprisings occurred in mid-1942 in small community ghettos.[203] Although there were armed resistance attempts in both the larger and smaller ghettos in 1943, in every case they failed against the overwhelming German military force, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the death camps.[204] Pogroms Main articles: Pogrom, Dorohoi Pogrom, Iaşi pogrom, Jedwabne Massacre, Legionnaires' Rebellion and Bucharest Pogrom, Lviv pogroms, and 1941 Odessa massacre A number of deadly pogroms occurred during the Holocaust.[205] The Germans encouraged some and others were spontaneous.[206]Some, such as the Iaşi pogrom, were in lands controlled by Germany's allies.[207] In the series of Lviv pogroms committed in occupied Poland, perhaps initiated by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, some 6,000 Polish Jews were murdered in the streets in July 1941, on top of 3,000 arrests and mass shootings by Einsatzgruppe C.[208] During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, in the presence of the German officers, several hundred Jews were murdered by some local Poles, with some being burned alive in a barn.[209][m] Death squads Main articles: The Holocaust in Ukraine, The Holocaust in Lithuania, The Holocaust in Latvia, The Holocaust in Estonia, The Holocaust in Belarus, The Holocaust in Russia, Einsatzgruppen, Mass graves in the Soviet Union, War crimes of the Wehrmacht, and Collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II See also: Babi Yar, Rumbula massacre, Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacre, and Ponary massacre Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.[210] German propaganda portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as both an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish, Romani and Slavic Untermenschen ("sub-humans").[211] German police shooting women and children from the Mizocz Ghetto, 14 October 1942 Local populations in some occupied Soviet territories actively participated in the killings of Jews and others. Besides participating in killings and pogroms, they helped identify Jews for persecution and rounded up Jews for German actions.[212]German involvement ranged from active instigation and involvement to more generalized guidance.[213] In Lithuania, Latvia, and western Ukraine locals were deeply involved in the murder of Jews from the beginning of the German occupation. Some of these Latvian and Lithuanian units also participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus. In the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews and some went to Poland to serve as concentration and death-camp guards.[212] Military units from some countries allied to Germany also killed Jews. Romanian units were given orders to exterminate and wipe out Jews in areas they controlled.[214] Ustaše militia in Croatia persecuted and murdered Jews, among others.[148] Many of the killings were carried out in public, a change from previous practice.[215] The mass killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories was assigned to four SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), which were under Heydrich's overall command. Similar formations had been used to a limited extent in Poland in 1939, but the ones operating in the Soviet territories were much larger.[216] The Einsatzgruppen's commanders were ordinary citizens: the great majority were professionals and most were intellectuals.[217] By the winter of 1941–1942, the four Einsatzgruppen and their helpers had killed almost 500,000 people.[218] The mass murder of 2,749 Jewson the beach near Liepāja, Latvia, 15–17 December 1941 The largest massacre of Jews by the mobile killing squads in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev,[219]where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on 29–30 September 1941.[220][n] A mixture of SS and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police, carried out the killings.[222] Although they did not actively participate in the killings, men of the 6th Army helped round up the Jews of Kiev and transport them to be shot.[223] By the end of the war, around two million are thought to have been victims of the Einsatzgruppen and their helpers in the local population and the German Army. Of those, about 1.3 million were Jews and up to a quarter of a million Roma.[224] Gas vans As the mass shootings continued in Russia, the Germans began to search for new methods of mass murder. This was driven by a need to have a more efficient method than simply shooting millions of victims. Himmler also feared that the mass shootings were causing psychological problems in the SS. His concerns were shared by his subordinates in the field.[225] In December 1939 and January 1940, another method besides shooting was tried. Experimental gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed compartment were used to kill the disabled and mentally-ill in occupied Poland.[226] Similar vans, but using the exhaust fumes rather than bottled gas, were introduced to the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941,[227] and some were used by in the occupied Soviet Union, for example in smaller clearing actions in the Minsk ghetto.[228] They also were used for murder in Yugoslavia.[229] Final Solution Wannsee Conference Main article: Final solution Copy of the Wannsee Conferenceminutes; this page lists the number of Jews in every European country. SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 at a villa in Berlin's Wannsee suburb. The 15 men present included Adolf Eichmann (who organized the deportation of Jews), Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo), and other leaders from the Nazi party and government departments responsible for policies linked to Jewish issues.[230] The conference's purpose was to discuss plans for a comprehensive "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe". Heydrich had been placed in overall charge.[231] He intended for the conference to share information, and therefore responsibility, among the officials.[232] Thirty copies of the minutes were made, and one, no. 16, was found by American prosecutors in March 1947 in a German Foreign Office folder.[233] Written by Eichmann and stamped "Top Secret", the minutes were written in "euphemistic language" on Heydrich's instructions, according to Eichmann's later testimony.[234] Heydrich told the meeting: "Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance."[230] He continued: Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.) ... The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East.[230] These evacuations were regarded as provisional or "temporary solutions" ("Ausweichmöglichkeiten").[235][o] The final solution would encompass the 11 million Jews living not only in territories controlled by Germany, but elsewhere in Europe and adjacent territories, such as Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary, "dependent on military developments".[235] There was little doubt what the final solution was, writes Peter Longerich: "the Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of forced labour and mass murder".[237] Extermination camps Approx. number killed at each extermination camp Camp name Killed Coordinates[238] Ref. Auschwitz II 1,100,000 50°2′9″N 19°10′42″E [239] Bełżec 600,000 50°22′18″N 23°27′27″E [240] Chełmno 320,000 52°9′27″N 18°43′43″E [241] Majdanek 78,000 51°13′13″N 22°36′0″E [242] Maly Trostinets 65,000 53°51′4″N 27°42′17″E [243] Sobibór 250,000 51°26′50″N 23°35′37″E [244] Treblinka 870,000 52°37′35″N 22°2′49″E [245] Killing on a mass scale using gas chambers or gas vans was the main difference between the extermination and concentration camps.[246] The Germans built six extermination camps in occupied Poland: Auschwitz II-Birkenau(October 1941);[44] Majdanek (October 1941);[44] Chełmno (November 1941);[247] and the three Operation Reinhard camps at Belzec (November 1941),[248] Sobibor (1942),[44] and Treblinka II (construction completed July 1942).[249][250] Maly Trostenets, a concentration camp in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, became a killing centre in 1942.[44] Using gas vans rather than gas chambers, Chełmno had its roots in the Aktion T4 euthanasia program.[251]Majdanek began as a POW camp, but in August 1942 it had gas chambers installed.[252] A few other camps are occasionally named as extermination camps, but there is no scholarly agreement on the additional camps; commonly mentioned are Mauthausen in Austria[253] and Stutthof.[254] There may also have been plans for camps at Mogilev and Lvov.[255] Gas chambers Victims usually arrived by train.[256] Almost all arrivals at the Operation Reinhard camps of Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec were sent directly to the gas chambers,[257]with individuals occasionally selected to replace dead workers.[258][259] At Auschwitz, the camp officials usually subjected individuals to selections, and some of the new arrivals deemed fit to work were sent to slave labour.[260] Those selected for death at all camps were told to undress and hand their valuables to camp workers.[261]They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. To prevent panic, they told these were showers or delousing chambers.[262] The procedure at Chełmno was slightly different. Victims there were placed in a mobile gas van and asphyxiated, while being driven to prepared burial pits in the nearby forests. There the corpses were unloaded and buried.[263] One of the Sonderkommando photographs shows women being sent to the gas chamber, Auschwitz-Birkenau, August 1944. At Auschwitz, after the chambers were filled, the doors were shut and pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents,[264] releasing toxic prussic acid, or hydrogen cyanide.[265] Those inside died within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to the commandant Rudolf Höss, who estimated that about one-third of the victims died immediately.[266] Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: "Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives."[267] The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed, gold fillings in their teeth were extracted, and women's hair was cut.[268] The work was done by the Sonderkommando, or work groups of Jewish prisoners.[269] At first at Auschwitz, the bodies were buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, they were dug up and burned. In early 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers.[270] At the three Reinhard camps the victims were killed by the exhaust fumes of stationary diesel engines.[257] Gold fillings were pulled from the corpses before burial, but the women's hair was cut before death. At Treblinka, in order to calm the arriving victims, the arrival platform was made to look like a train station, complete with fake clock.[271] Majdanek used Zyklon-B gas in its gas chambers.[272] In contrast to Auschwitz, the three Reinhard camps were quite small.[273] At these camps, most of the initial victims were buried in pits, but in 1942 in order to hide the evidence of the extermination, the exhumation of the bodies and cremation of them was begun. Sobibór and Bełżec began the process in late 1942 but Treblinka did not start until March 1943. The bodies were burned in open fireplaces and the remaining bones were crushed into powder.[274] Jewish resistance Main article: Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe Captured members of the Jewish resistance, Warsaw Ghetto, 1943. Peter Longerich observes that in ghettos in Poland by the end of 1942, "there was practically no resistance", in part because there were no organized groups until early 1942.[275] Raul Hilberg accounts for this compliant attitude by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: as had been the case before, appealing to their oppressors and complying with orders might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated.[276] They were "caught in the straitjacket of their history", and the realization that this time was different came too late.[276] Discussing Warsaw, Timothy Snyder notes in a similar vein that it was only during the three months after the deportations of July–September 1942 that agreement on the need for armed resistance was reached.[277] By the time of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of spring 1943, only a small minority of Polish Jews were still alive.[278][p] Groups such as the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto and the United Partisan Organization in Vilna were formed.[281]Over 100 revolts and uprisings occurred in at least 19 ghettos and other locations in Eastern Europe. The best known is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when around 1,000 poorly armed Jewish fighters[q] held the SS at bay for four weeks.[283][s] During a revolt in Treblinka on 2 August 1943, inmates killed five or six guards and set fire to camp buildings; several managed to escape.[287][288] Members of the Jewish resistance, the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, active in the Vilnius Ghetto.[289] In the Białystok Ghetto on 16 August 1943, a group of Jewish insurgents revolted when the Germans announced mass deportations. The fighting lasted five days, but the fighters were defeated.[290] On 14 October 1943, Jews in Sobibór, including Jewish-Soviet prisoners of war, attempted an escape,[291] killing 11 SS officers and a couple of Ukrainian camp guards.[292] Around 300 prisoners escaped, but 100 were recaptured and shot.[293][291] In October 1944, Jewish members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz attacked their guards and blew up Crematorium IV with explosives that had been smuggled in. Three German guards were killed, one of whom was stuffed into an oven. The Sonderkommando attempted a mass breakout, but all were killed.[294] Estimates of Jewish participation in partisan units throughout Europe range from 20,000 to 100,000.[295] In the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans,[296] although the partisan movements did not always welcome them.[297] An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 joined the Soviet partisan movement.[298] One of the famous Jewish groups was the Bielski partisans in Belarus, led by the Bielski brothers.[296] Jews also joined Polish forces, including the Home Army. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943".[299][t] Flow of information from the camps Further information: The New York Times § World War II The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland by the Polish government-in-exile, addressed to the United Nations, 10 December 1942 The Polish government-in-exile in London learned about the extermination camps from the Polish leadership in Warsaw, who from 1940 "received a continual flow of information about Auschwitz".[305] Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown.[306] The Auschwitz escapes that succeeded were made possible by the Polish underground inside the camp and local people outside.[307] Anyone assisting Jews within occupied Poland risked lthe death penalty.[308] In February 1942, Szlama Ber Winer escaped from the Chełmno concentration camp and passed detailed information about it to the Oneg Shabbat group in the Warsaw Ghetto. His report, known by his pseudonym as the Grojanowski Report, had reached London by June 1942.[241][309] Also in 1942, Jan Karski reported to the Allies on the plight of Jews after being smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto twice.[310][311][u] In late July or early August 1942, Polish leaders learned about the mass killings taking place inside Auschwitz. The Polish Interior Ministry prepared a report, Sprawozdanie 6/42,[305][313] which said at the end: There are different methods of execution. People are shot by firing squads, killed by an "air hammer", and poisoned by gas in special gas chambers. Prisoners condemned to death by the Gestapo are murdered by the first two methods. The third method, the gas chamber, is employed for those who are ill or incapable of work and those who have been brought in transports especially for the purpose/Soviet prisoners of war, and, recently Jews.[305] The report was sent to Polish officials in London by courier and had reached them by 12 November, when it was translated into English and added to another report, "Report on Conditions in Poland". Dated 27 November 1942, this was forwarded to the Polish Embassy in the United States.[314] On December 10 the Polish Foreign Affairs Mnister, Edward Raczyński, addressed the United Nations on the killings; the address was distributed with the title The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. He told them about the use of poison gas; about Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibor; that the Polish underground had referred to them as extermination camps; and that tens of thousands of Jews had been killed in Bełżec in March and April 1942.[315] One in three Jews in Poland were already dead, he estimated, from a population of 3,130,000.[316] Raczyński's address was covered by the New York Times and The Times of London. Winston Churchill received it, and Anthony Eden presented it to the British cabinet. On 17 December 1942, 11 Allies issued the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations condemning the "bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination".[317][318] The British and American governments were reluctant to publicize the intelligence they had received. Although the information was felt to be correct, the stories were so extreme that they feared the public would discount them as exaggerations and thus undermine the credibility of both governments.[319] In addition, the US government hesitated to emphasize the atrocities for fear of turning the war into a war about the Jews. Antisemitism and isolationism were common in the US before its entry into the war, and the government wanted to avoid too great a focus on Jewish suffering to keep isolationism from gaining ground.[320] Climax, holocaust in Hungary Jews from Carpathian Rutheniaarriving at Auschwitz, May 1944 Jews from Hungary arriving at Auschwitz, Summer 1944 Most of the Jewish ghettos of General Government were liquidated in 1942–1943, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination.[321][322][v] About 42,000 Jews were shot during the Operation Harvest Festival on 3–4 November 1943.[324]At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe at the extermination camps.[325] Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was mostly left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally recruited auxiliaries.[326][w] Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority over anything but the army's needs on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation at the end of 1942.[328] Army leaders and economic managers complained about this diversion of resources and the killing of skilled Jewish workers,[329] but Nazi leaders rated ideological imperatives above economic considerations.[330] By 1943 it was evident to the armed forces leadership that Germany was losing the war.[331] The mass murder continued nevertheless, reaching a "frenetic" pace in 1944.[332] Auschwitz was gassing up to 6,000 Jews a day by spring that year.[333]On 19 March, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary and dispatched Eichmann to Budapest to supervise the deportation of the country's Jews.[334] From 22 March, Jews were required to wear the yellow star; were forbidden from owning cars, bicycles, radios or telephones; then were forced into ghettos. From 15 May to 9 July 1944, 440,000 Jews were sent from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were killed immediately.[335] Just before the deportations began, Eichmann made an offer to the Allies that he would exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks and other goods, the so-called "blood for goods" proposal. The Times called it "a new level of fantasy and self-deception".[336] Death marches Main article: Death marches (Holocaust) Bodies of 2,000–3,000 prisoners evacuated from Buchenwald in 40 sealed boxcars on 7 April 1945, arriving at Dachau on 28 April By mid-1944, those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated,[337] in proportions ranging from about 25 percent in France[338] to more than 90 percent in Poland.[339] On 5 May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "the Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and in the countries occupied by Germany".[340] As the Soviet armed forces advanced, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, with surviving inmates shipped to camps closer to Germany.[341] Efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps and in the mass shootings. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, and the mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated.[342] Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.[343] Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march out of the camps. Some were marched to train stations and transported for days at a time without food or shelter in open freight cars, then forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Others were marched the entire distance to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 250,000 Jews died during these marches.[344] Liberation Main articles: Battle of Berlin, Death of Adolf Hitler, Prague Offensive, and Victory in Europe Day Fritz Klein, the camp doctor, standing in a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen after the camp's liberation by the British 11th Armoured Division, April 1945 The first major camp to be encountered by Allied troops, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on 25 July 1944.[345] Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Germans in 1943.[346] Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on 27 January 1945;[347] Buchenwald by the Americans on 11 April;[348] Bergen-Belsen by the British on 15 April;[349] Dachau by the Americans on 29 April;[350] Ravensbrück by the Soviets on 30 April;[351] and Mauthausen by the Americans on 5 May.[352] The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 4 May, days before the Soviets arrived.[353][354] The Soviets found 7,600 inmates in Auschwitz.[355] Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division;[356] 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 people died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.[357] The BBC's war correspondent, Richard Dimbleby, described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen, in a report so graphic that the BBC declined to broadcast it for four days and did so, on 19 April, only after Dimbleby had threatened to resign:[358] Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which. ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live. ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms. ... He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life. — Richard Dimbleby, 15 April 1945[359] Responses to the Holocaust Main article: International response to the Holocaust Perpetrator's motivations Main articles: German war crimes, War crimes of the Wehrmacht, Responsibility for the Holocaust, and List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust In his 1965 essay "Command and Compliance", historian Hans Buchheim wrote there was no coercion to murder Jews and others, and all who committed such actions did so out of free will.[360] Buchheim wrote that the chances to avoid participating in killing Jews were available for perpetrators, although they did not often admit that after the war,[360] and that he found no evidence that SS men who refused to carry out criminal orders were sent to concentration camps or executed.[361] Moreover, SS rules prohibited acts of gratuitous sadism and acts of sadism were taken on the individual initiative of those who were either especially cruel or who wished to prove themselves ardent Nazis.[360] Finally, he argued that those who committed crimes did so because they wished to conform to the values of the group and were afraid of being branded "weak" by their colleagues.[362] In his 1992 monograph Ordinary Men, the historian Christopher Browning examined the deeds of German Reserve Police Battalion 101, used for massacres and round-ups of Jews as well as deportations to the death camps. The members of the battalion were middle-aged men of working-class background who were too old for regular military duty.[363] They were given no special training for genocide and at first,[364] the commander gave his men the choice of opting out of direct participation in the killing of Jews if they found it too unpleasant. The majority chose not to opt out; fewer than 12 men, out of a battalion of 500 did so on the first occasion.[365]Browning argued that the men of the battalion killed out of peer pressure, not blood-lust.[366] Historian Sergei Kudryashov studied the guards trained at the Trawniki SS camp division ("Trawniki men" or "Trawniki guards"),[367] who provided personnel for the Operation Reinhard death camps and other concentration camps.[368] Most of them were former Red Army soldiers who volunteered to join the SS in order to get out of the POW camps.[369] The vast majority carried out the SS's expectations of how to treat Jews,[370] and most personally killed Jews.[371] Agreeing with Browning, Kudryashov argued that the Trawniki men were examples of ordinary people becoming willing killers.[372] Germans usually justified the Einsatzgruppen's massacres on the grounds of anti-Bolshevik, anti-partisan or anti-bandit operations, but the historian Andreas Hillgruberaruges that this was merely an excuse for the German Army's considerable involvement in the Holocaust in Russia.[373] Hillgruber maintained that those German generals who claimed that the Einsatzgruppen were a necessary anti-partisan response were lying.[373] Jürgen Förster agrees, and argued that the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust. He said it is wrong to describe the Holocaust as solely the work of the SS with the Wehrmacht as a passive and disapproving bystander.[374] Army co-operation with the SS in anti-Bolshevik, anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations was close and intensive. After a 1941 SS "anti-partisan" operation which killed over 14,000 Jews and only 1000 partisans, General Max von Schenckendorff, who commanded the Army Group Center Rear Area, ordered that all Wehrmachtsecurity divisions should emulate this example when on anti-partisan duty, and organized a joint SS-Wehrmacht seminar on how best to kill Jews. The event, that became known as the Mogilev Conference, ended with a German unit killing Jews as a demonstration.[375] German public In his 1983 book, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw examined everyday life in Bavaria during the Nazi period. Kershaw argued that the most common viewpoint of Bavarians was indifference towards the persecution of Jews. Kershaw argued that most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the genocide, but were vastly more concerned about the war than the "Final Solution".[376] Kershaw made the analogy that "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".[377][378] Kershaw's assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication most Germans, were indifferent to the Holocaust faced criticism from historians Otto Dov Kulka and Michael Kater. Kater maintained that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular antisemitism, and that though admitting that most of the "spontaneous" antisemitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme antisemitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above.[379] Kulka argued that most Germans were more antisemitic than Kershaw portrayed them and that rather than "indifference", "passive complicity" would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people.[380] In a study focusing only on the views about Jews among Germans opposed to the Nazi regime, historian Christof Dipper in his 1983 essay "Der Deutsche Widerstand und die Juden" argued that the majority of the anti-Nazi national-conservatives were antisemitic.[379] Though Dipper noted no one in the German resistance supported the Holocaust, he also commented that the national-conservatives did not intend to restore civil rights to the Jews after the planned overthrow of Hitler.[379] Research by the United States Holocaust Museum has established that because the camps were so widespread,[x] it is unlikely that the German population could have avoided knowing about the persecutions and killings.[166] Robert Gellately has argued that the German civilian population was, by and large, aware of what was happening, except for the use of gas chambers, because the government openly discussed the concentration camps, detention without trial, and extensive use of the death penalty in the media.[381] Victims and death toll Victims Killed Source Jews 5.93 million Dawidowicz[382] Soviet POWs 2–3 million Berenbaum[383] Ethnic Poles 1.8–1.9 million Piotrowski[384] Roma 90,000–220,000 Berenbaum[385] Disabled 150,000 Niewyk & Nicosia[386] Jehovah's Witnesses 1,400 to 2,500 USHMM[387]Milton[388] Gay men Unknown USHMM[389] Further information: Holocaust victims Using the most restrictive definition of the Holocaust produces a death toll of around six million Jews, the figure cited by Adolf Eichmann, one of the Holocaust's architects.[390][391] The broadest definition would raise the death toll to 17 million.[4] A research project started in 2000, led by Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, estimated in 2013 that 15–20 million people had died or been imprisoned in the sites they have identified to date.[166] Jews According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, "[a]ll the serious research" confirms that between five and six million Jews died.[392] Early postwar calculations were 4.2 to 4.5 million from Gerald Reitlinger;[393] 5.1 million from Raul Hilberg; and 5.95 million from Jacob Lestschinsky.[390] In 1986 Lucy S. Dawidowicz used the pre-war census figures to estimate 5.934 million.[382] Yehuda Bauer and Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990) estimate 5.59–5.86 million.[394] A 1996 study led by Wolfgang Benz suggested 5.29 to 6.2 million, based on comparing pre- and post-war census records and surviving German documentation on deportations and killings.[392] Martin Gilbert arrived at a minimum of 5.75 million.[395] Figures according to Wolfgang Benz[y] Country (1945) Death toll of Jews Poland 2,700,000 Soviet Union 2,100,000 Hungary 559,250 Germany 144,000 Czechoslovakia 143,000 Romania 120,919 Netherlands 102,000 France 76,000 Greece 58,443 Yugoslavia 51,400 Austria 48,767 Belgium 28,000 Bulgaria 7,335 Italy 5,596 Norway 758 Luxembourg 720 Albania 591 Denmark 116 The Jews killed represented around one third of the world population of Jews,[397] and about two-thirds of European Jewry, based on an estimate of 9.7 million Jews in Europe at the start of the war.[398][399] Of the dead, 1.5 million were children.[400]Much of the uncertainty stems from the lack of a reliable figure for the number of Jews in Europe in 1939, the numerous border changes that make avoiding double-counting of victims difficult, the lack of accurate records from the perpetrators, and uncertainty about whether deaths occurring months after liberation, but caused by the persecution, should be counted.[393] Almost all Jews within the areas occupied by the Germans were killed.There were 3,020,000 Jews in the Soviet Union in 1939, and the losses were 1–1.1 million.[401] Around one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories.[402][403] Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, about 90 percent were killed.[339] Many more died in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.[404] The death camps accounted for half the number of Jews killed; 80–90 percent of death-camp victims are estimated to have been Jews.[382] At Auschwitz-Birkenau the Jewish death toll was 1.1 million;[239][405]Treblinka 870,000–925,000;[406] Bełżec 434,000[407] to 600,000;[240] Chełmno 152,000[408] to 320,000;[241] Sobibór170,000[409] to 250,000;[244] and Majdanek 79,000.[242] Roma Main article: Porajmos Further information: Antiziganism Because the Roma are traditionally a private people with a culture based on oral history, less is known about their experience during the Holocaust than that of any other group.[410] Bauer writes that this can be attributed to the Roma's distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the taboos in Romani culture regarding hygiene and sex were violated at Auschwitz.[411] The Roma were subject to discrimination under the Nuremberg racial laws.[412] The Germans saw them as hereditary criminals and "asocials", and this was reflected in their classification in the concentration camps, where they were usually counted among the asocials and given black triangles to wear.[413] According to Niewyk and Nicosia, at least 130,000 died, out of nearly one million in German-occupied Europe.[410] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum calculates at least 220,000.[414]Ian Hancock, who specializes in Romani history and culture, argues for between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[415] The Roma refer to the genocide as the Pořajmos.[416] Roma waiting to be deported from Asperg, Germany, 22 May 1940 The treatment of the Roma was not consistent across German-occupied territories, with those in France and the Low Countries subject to restrictions on movement and some confinement to collection camps. Those in Central and Eastern Europe were sent to concentration camps and murdered by soldiers and execution squads.[417] Before being sent to the camps, they were herded into ghettos, including several hundred into the Warsaw Ghetto.[199] Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Romani encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also targeted by allies of the Germans, such as the Ustaše regime in Croatia, where a large number were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp;[417] the total killed in Croatia numbered around 28,000.[418] After the Germans occupied Hungary, 1,000 Roma were deported to Auschwitz.[419] In May 1942, the Roma were placed under similar labour and social laws to the Jews. On 16 December 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree that "Gypsy Mischlinge [mixed breeds], Roma Gypsies, and members of the clans of Balkan origins who are not of German blood" should be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht. This was adjusted on 15 November 1943, when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps." Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Roma, originally an Aryan population, had been "spoiled" by non-Romani blood.[420] Disabled and mentally ill Main articles: Nazi eugenics, Aktion T4, Erbkrank, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, Life unworthy of life, and Schloss Hartheim Hitler's order for Aktion T4 Nazis used the phrase Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life) in reference to their disabled or mentally-ill victims.[421] In July 1933, the Sterilization Law allowing for compulsory sterilization of the "inferior" was passed.[422] In the first year of operation, this eugenics policy had over 80,000 cases, which were decided in favour of sterilization over 90 percent of the time. Estimates for the total number of involuntary sterilizations during the whole of the Third Reich range from 300,000 to 400,000.[423] In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of Hitler's Chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out the programme of involuntary euthanasia, known as Aktion T4.[424] T4 was mainly directed at adults, but the euthanasia against children also began in October 1939.[425] The Aktion T4 programme aimed to maintain the racial purity of the German people by killing or sterilizing citizens judged disabled or mentally ill. The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, where the various organizations involved were headquartered.[426] Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally-ill adults in institutions were killed, as were 5,000 children and 1,000 Jews, also in institutions. In addition there were specialized killing centres, where the deaths were estimated at 20,000, according to Georg Renno, the deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers, or 400,000, according to Frank Zeireis, the commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp.[427] Overall, the number of mentally and physically handicapped murdered was about 150,000.[386] Despite not being formally ordered to take part, psychiatrists and many psychiatric institutions took part in the planning and carrying out of the Aktion T4at every stage, and constituted the connection to the later annihilation of Jews and others in the Holocaust.[428] After strong protests by the German Catholic and Protestant churches, Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program in August 1941,[429] although the disabled and mentally-ill continued to be killed until the end of the war.[386] Slavs Main articles: Generalplan Ost and Hunger Plan The Nazis considered the Slavs as subhuman, or Untermenschen.[430][431] In a secret memorandum dated 25 May 1940, Heinrich Himmler stated that it was in German interests to foster divisions between the ethnic groups in the East. He also wanted to restrict non-Germans in the conquered territories to schools that would only teach them how to write their own name, count up to 500, and obey Germans.[432][433] Himmler's Generalplan Ost (General Plan East), agreed to by Hitler in the summer of 1942,[434] involved exterminating, expelling, or enslaving all or most Slavs from their lands over a period of 20–30 years to make living space for Germans.[435] Rudolph Rummel estimates the number of Slav civilians and POWs murdered by the Germans to be 10,547,000.[436] Ethnic Poles Further information: Nazi crimes against the Polish nation, Occupation of Poland (1939–45), and The Holocaust in Poland Execution of Poles by Einsatzkommando, Leszno, October 1939 German planners in November 1939 called for "the complete destruction" of all Poles.[437] Poland under German occupation was to be cleared of Poles and settled by German colonists.[438] The Polish political leadership and other leaders were the targets of an organized campaign of murder.[439] But German planners decided against a genocide of ethnic Poles on the same scale as against Jews, at least in the short term.[440] Between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished at German hands during the course of the war, about four-fifths of whom were ethnic Poles with the rest ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians.[384] At least 200,000 of these victims died in concentration camps with around 146,000 killed in Auschwitz. Many others died as a result of general massacres or uprisings such as the Warsaw Uprising, where between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed.[441] The policy of the Germans in Poland included reducing food rations, deliberate lowering of public hygiene, and the deprivation of medical services. The general mortality rate rose from 13 to 18 per thousand.[442][additional citation needed] Overall, about 5.6 million of the victims of World War II were Polish citizens,[citation needed] both Jewish and non-Jewish, and over the course of the war Poland lost 16 percent of its pre-war population.[443] Over 90 percent of the death toll came through non-military losses, through various deliberate actions by Germany and the Soviet Union.[441]Polish children were also kidnapped by Germans in order to be "Germanized", with perhaps as many as 200,000 children being stolen from their families for this purpose.[444] Soviet citizens and POWs Main articles: German occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war Naked Soviet POWs in the Mauthausen concentration camp, date unknown Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were also heavily persecuted outside of events taking place in the frontline warfare of the Eastern Front.[445] Villages throughout the Soviet Union were destroyed by German troops.[446] Germans rounded up civilians for forced labour in Germany as well as causing famines by taking foodstuffs.[447] In Belarus, Germany imposed a regime in the country that deported some 380,000 people for slave labour and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. More than 600 villages had their entire populations killed and at least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Germans. According to Timothy Snyder, of "the nine million people who were on the territory of Soviet Belarus in 1941, some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans in actions away from battlefields, including about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews, and 320,000 people counted as partisans (the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians)".[448] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has estimated that 3.3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody.[449] The death rates decreased as the POWs were needed to work as slaves to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million of them had been deployed as slave labour.[383] Political opponents German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the earliest opponents of the Nazis,[450] and they were also among the first to be sent to concentration camps.[451] Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler issued the Commissar Order, which ordered the execution of all political commissars and Communist Party members captured.[452] Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog") was a directive of Hitler in December 1941, resulting in kidnapping and the disappearance of political activists throughout the German occupied territories.[453] Gay men Main articles: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Pink triangle, and Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust Pink-triangle memorial in Nollendorfplatz, Berlin Around 50,000 German gay men were jailed between 1933 and 1945, and 5,000–15,000 are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps.[389][454] James Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden" ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the guiding legal principle.[455] In 1936, Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion.[456] The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.[455] Lesbians were left relatively unaffected; the Nazis saw them as "asocials", rather than sexual deviants.[389] Tens of thousands of men were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation", where they were identified by pink triangles.[455] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes "voluntarily" to avoid criminal sentences.[457] Steakley writes that the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany.[455] Persons of color Main articles: Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany and Rhineland Bastard The number of Afro-Germans in Germany when the Nazis came to power is variously estimated at 5,000–25,000.[458] It is not clear whether these figures included Asians. Although blacks in Germany and German-occupied Europe were subjected to incarceration, sterilization, murder, and other abuse, there was no programme to kill them all as there was for the Jews.[459] Jehovah's Witnesses Main article: Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority.[460] They were marked out by purple triangles. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates between 2700 and 3300 were sent to concentration camps,[387] but Sybil Milton states the number in the camps was 10,000.[388] Between 1400[387] and 2500 died while in the camps.[388] Historian Detlef Garbe writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."[461] Aftermath Main article: Aftermath of the Holocaust Trials Main articles: Nuremberg trials and Dachau trials Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials. The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring(at the left edge on the first row of benches), considered to be the most important surviving official in the Third Reich after Hitler's death. Göring later committed suicide. The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after World War II in Nuremberg, Germany, to prosecute prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The first of these trials was the 1945–1946 trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT).[462] This tribunal tried 22 political and military leaders of the Third Reich,[463] except for Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels, all of whom had committed suicide several months before.[464] The prosecution entered indictments against 24 major war criminals[z] and seven organizations—the leadership of the Naziparty, the Reich Cabinet, the Schutzstaffel (SS), Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Gestapo, the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the "General Staff and High Command". The indictments were for: participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. The Tribunal passed out sentences ranging from acquittal to death by hanging.[465] Further trials at Nuremberg took place between 1946 and 1949, which tried a further 185 defendants.[466] Reparations Main article: Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany In March 1951, a request was made by Israel which claimed global recompense to Israel of $1.5 billion based on the financial cost absorbed by Israel for the rehabilitation of 500,000 Jewish survivors. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenaueraccepted these terms and declared he was ready to negotiate other reparations. A Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany was opened in order to help with individual claims. After negotiations, the claim was reduced to a sum of $720 million in direct and indirect compensation to be paid over a period of 12 years.[467] In 1988, West Germany allocated another $125 million for reparations. In 1999, many German industries such as Deutsche Bank, Siemens or BMW faced lawsuits for their role in the forced labour during World War II. In order to dismiss these lawsuits, Germany agreed to raise $5 billion for reparations.[468] In 2013, Germany agreed to pay a new reparation of €772 million as a result of negotiations with Israel.[469] In 2014, the SNCF, the French state-owned railway company, was compelled to allocate $60 million to American Jewish Holocaust survivors for its role in the transport of deportees to Germany.[470] These reparations were sometimes criticized in Israel where they were seen as "blood money".[468] Uniqueness question In Is the Holocaust Unique? (1995), Shimon Samuels described the acrimonious debate in Holocaust scholarship between "specifists" and "universalists". The former fear debasement of the Holocaust by invidious comparisons. The latter consider it immoral to hold the Holocaust as beyond comparison.[471] Peter Novick argued that it is "deeply offensive" to view the Holocaust as unique: What else can all of this possibly mean except 'your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary' ...."[472] Historian Dan Stone wrote in 2010 that the idea of the Holocaust as unique has been overtaken by attempts to place it in the context of early-20th-century Stalinism, ethnic cleansing, war, and the Nazis' plans for "demographic reordering" after the war.[473] Specifist arguments continue nevertheless to inform the views of many specialists. A 2015 view from a historian of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans: Thus although the Nazi 'Final Solution' was one genocide among many, it had features that made it stand out from all the rest as well. Unlike all the others it was bounded neither by space nor by time. It was launched not against a local or regional obstacle, but at a world-enemy seen as operating on a global scale. It was bound to an even larger plan of racial reordering and reconstruction involving further genocidal killing on an almost unimaginable scale, aimed, however, at clearing the way in a particular region – Eastern Europe – for a further struggle against the Jews and those the Nazis regarded as their puppets. It was set in motion by ideologues who saw world history in racial terms. It was, in part, carried out by industrial methods. These things all make it unique. — Richard Evans, The Third Reich in History and Memory[42]