The capital of the Polish state established in 1918, Warsaw was a major center of Jewish culture and home to the largest Jewish community in Europe with over 350,000 people--around 30 percent of the city's total population. Warsaw was occupied by the Nazis on September 29, 1939 and fell under the administration of the Generalgouvernement. Anti-Jewish measures were immediately implemented. The Warsaw Ghetto was established in October 1940, when some 400,000 Jews from Warsaw and surrounding communities were condensed into an area of 1.3 square miles. An estimated 83,000 ghetto inhabitants died of starvation and disease. Deportations sparked the largest Jewish uprising against the Nazis during the war, the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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The city of Lodz was home to the second-largest Jewish community in prewar Poland. Occupied by the Germany on September 8, 1939, Lodz was annexed to the Third Reich as part of the Warthegau region and renamed Litzmannstadt after a German World War I general. Lodz ghetto was sealed in early 1940 with c. 160,000 Jewish inhabitants, who performed forced labor in factories and workshops established within the ghetto. In 1942, c. 70,000 inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto were deported to the Chelmno killing center, where they were murdered in specially-equipped mobile gassing vans. The Lodz ghetto was the last ghetto in German-occupied Poland to be liquidated. The remaining c. 75,000 inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944.
ANazi transit camp operating in the Netherlands under German occupation from 1942-1945. Dutch Jews were collected in Westerbork prior to deportation to concentration camps and killing centers in the east. Of the more than 100,000 Jews who passed through the camp, only 5,000 survived. Most were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. [...]
Between 1917-1922, a series of socialist revolutions in Russia ousted Tsar Nicholas II and installed a communist government under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Soviet Union or the U.S.S.R., was a one-party federation comprising Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. In 1924 Lenin was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who led the U.S.S.R. during World War II. Calling for communist revolution worldwide, the Soviet Union was a natural enemy of the far-right Nazi state. Hitler desired Soviet land for expansion of German Nazism and, after a brief pact, invaded in 1941. The U.S.S.R. was dissolved in 1991.
Concentration camp initially established in July 1941 for the incarceration of Soviet soldiers and civilian prisoners. Under Operation “Reinhard” Trawniki was used as a training facility for police deployments and, between June 1942 and September 1943, housed Jewish forced laborers. From September 1943, Trawniki was part of the Majdanek camp complex. Approximately 6,000 inmates were shot during Operation “Harvest Festival” on November 3, 1943.
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