#WHEN WAS THE HOLOCAUST ARCHIVE#

The Nazis also used poisonous gas, in vans and later in gas chambers at six death camps (Chelmno, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka). By then, the Nazis had already deployed Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) to massacre Jewish communities in Poland and the Soviet Union. Within several years, mass murder became the official Nazi policy (officially organized at the 1942 Wannsee Conference). The Nazis also targeted racial, political, or ideological groups deemed “inferior” or “undesirable” – “Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Slavic peoples, the mentally and physically disabled, Socialists, Communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Millions of Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Jews were forced to wear identifying symbols, relocate to heavily crowded ghettos, and participate in forced labor. Holocaust Memorial Museum).ĭuring World War II, the Nazis systematically targeted Jews in Nazi occupied territories. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning ‘sacrifice by fire’” (U.S. “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. From 1933 until 1939, the Nazi government enacted hundreds of increasingly restrictive and discriminatory laws and decrees that banned Jews from all aspects of German public life. The Nazis established a single party dictatorship referred to as the Third Reich. This was the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic.

After the Reichstagįire, Hitler manipulated Article 48 and passed the Enabling Act, which allowed him to pass laws without the approval of the Reichstag or the President. In January 1933, he was appointed Chancellor by President von Hindenburg. In 1932, Adolf Hitler, leader of the nationalistic, antisemitic and racist National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party), was elected to the German Reichstag (Parliament). However, as an emergency measure in the name of national security, Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution allowed for the suspension of these civil liberties. The constitution of the Weimar Republic was very progressive and allowed women the right to vote, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. In February 1919, a new German government was created: the Weimar Republic. Their leader, the Kaiser, was forced to step down and the Treaty of Versailles led to significant loss of land and citizens. The indexing terms include approximately 47,000 specific geographic locations, not only from Europe but from all over the world, and around 8,000 experiential terms used to describe the huge variety of events, experiences, organizations, and other subjectsĪfter World War I, Germany was in shambles and its people, led to believe they were winning the war right up until defeat, were in shock.

#WHEN WAS THE HOLOCAUST ARCHIVE#

For example, the archive includes over 1.966 million name records-those of the interviewees themselves, their family members and anyone else they talk about in the interview. The indexing of each interview enables researchers to search in detail for the people, places, events, and experiences described in each one. Around 159 testimonies conclude with walking interviews, filmed at sites of former concentration camps, ghettos, mass graves, hiding places, or in front of prewar family homes. At the end of the interview, they displayed photographs, documents, and artifacts pertaining to their family and wartime experiences, and then introduced family members and friends on camera. Interviewees were typically encouraged to share their stories in chronological order, recalling memories from before, during, and after World War II. USC Shoah Foundation interviews were conducted by a single interviewer, while JFCS interviews, for example, were in many instances conducted by two. The archive also includes the testimonies of political prisoners, Roma (Gypsy) survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and homosexual survivors as well as rescuers, liberators, and participants in war crimes trials. The majority of the interviews are with Jewish Holocaust survivors. Those partners include the Blavatnik Archive Foundation, Florida Holocaust Museum, Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus, Holocaust Museum Houston, the Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, The Azrieli Foundation in Toronto as well as several other Canadian organizations. Through the “Preserving the Legacy” initiative, the Institute has partnered with several organization with their own Holocaust testimony collections to index and preserve them in the Visual History Archive. The majority of them were recorded by USC Shoah Foundation between 19. The Visual History Archive contains 54,196 audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust witnesses.

When was the holocaust