“Once in my lifetime I want to still have a whole loaf of bread. That was my dream.”  

– Itka Zygmuntowicz (1926–2020), Survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Death Camp (1940–1945)

RG-50.030*0435, Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz, (1926-2020). Oral History Interviews of the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. 

 


 

THE HOLOCAUST WAS THE STATE-SPONSORED, ideologically-driven persecution and murder of six million Jews across Europe and half a million Roma and Sinti by Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and other racist states. Nazi ideology built upon pre-existing antisemitism and antigypsyism. Some local people collaborated willingly. Others assisted the victimized. Most were witnesses. Nazi racism demanded the forced sterilization of Germans of African descent, the murder of Germans with disabilities and Soviet prisoners of war, and the enslavement of Slavs. The Nazis criminalized all they deemed as regime opponents, including homosexuals, political dissenters, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. But in the Nazi imagination, Jews loomed as the primary threat to their new world order. The Nazi government enacted its racist antisemitic agenda and, after 1941, embarked upon murdering every Jewish child, woman, and man. 

 

to download the map of sites of incarceration and forced labour under the Nazi regime and its allies, 1933-1945. 

The link to the map is hosted on an external website and is provided for informational purposes only.


Map by Ms. Maja Kruse and Professor Anne Kelly Knowles. Copyright Professor Anne Kelly Knowles and Ms. Maja Kruse.

 

The World that was  Aftermath

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