50 Fun Facts About Holocaust History

Which country offered to accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees at the 1938 Évian Conference?

The Dominican Republic offered to accept up to 100,000 refugees on generous terms while the other delegations made no commitment at all. Dictator Rafael Trujillo later donated land near Sosúa for a settlement.

What sounds across Israel at 10 a.m. on Yom HaShoah, halting traffic for two minutes of silence?

An air-raid siren sounds for two minutes and Israelis stop whatever they are doing, with motorists stepping out of their cars to stand in silence. Places of entertainment close by law and flags fly at half mast.

The UN's Holocaust remembrance day, tied to the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, falls on which date?

27 January was fixed by UN General Assembly resolution 60/7 in 2005, the date the Red Army reached Auschwitz in 1945. Britain's Holocaust Memorial Day shares the date, while Israel's Yom HaShoah follows the Hebrew calendar.

Danish boats carried some 7,500 of Denmark's Jews to safety in which country in October 1943?

Sweden took in the Danish Jews after a German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, leaked the date of the planned round-up. Fishing boats carried 7,500 Jews and 686 non-Jewish spouses across the water in a few weeks.

Which port refused to land the 937 refugees aboard the liner St. Louis in May 1939?

Havana refused to let the passengers land, the United States and Canada then also turned the ship away, and it sailed back to Europe. Daniel Libeskind's Wheel of Conscience memorial in Halifax recalls the refusal.

Which 1938–39 rescue brought nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to Britain by train and ferry?

The Kindertransport ran for nine months until the outbreak of war; the first party of 196 children landed at Harwich on 2 December 1938, most of them from a Berlin orphanage burned on Kristallnacht.

Stolpersteine, brass plaques set in pavements outside victims' last homes, are German for what?

Stumbling stones is the literal meaning: each ten-centimetre cube makes a passer-by pause over one name. Artist Gunter Demnig's project has laid more than 100,000 of them, the world's largest decentralised memorial.

Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is a sloping grid of 2,711 what?

Concrete slabs, or stelae, of identical footprint but heights from 0.2 to 4.7 metres cover a 1.9-hectare site; an underground Place of Information beneath holds the names of about three million victims.

Kristallnacht, the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, is known in English as the Night of what?

Broken Glass refers to the shards from smashed shop windows and synagogues that littered German streets the next morning. In Germany the term is now often replaced by Novemberpogrome, as 'Kristallnacht' was felt to trivialise the attacks.

Mossad agents seized Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the deportations, in which country in May 1960?

Argentina had sheltered him since 1950, when he arrived under false papers obtained through a network run by a Catholic bishop. He had prepared the minutes of the Wannsee Conference and was tried in Jerusalem in 1961.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on 19 April 1943, on the eve of which Jewish festival?

Passover eve was when the SS moved in to deport the ghetto's remaining residents, and the fighters held out until 16 May. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during the war.

Who led the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) from the bunker at 18 Miła Street in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

Mordechai Anielewicz was the chief commander of ŻOB; the kibbutz Yad Mordechai is named for him, and a bronze statue of him was unveiled there on Israel's first official remembrance day in 1951.

How did Irena Sendler preserve the lists of the Jewish children her network smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto?

Buried in jars, the lists recorded each child's original and new identity so that families could be reunited after the war. Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943 and was later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations.

Israel's memorial Yad Vashem, 'a memorial and a name', draws its title from which book of the Bible?

Isaiah 56:5 promises 'a memorial and a name ... that shall not be cut off', the idea behind a national depository of names for victims with no one left to remember them. The Knesset established the site in 1953.

Where did Swedish envoy Raoul Wallenberg shelter Jews in 1944 with protective passports and 'Swedish' buildings?

Budapest was Wallenberg's post from July 1944 until Soviet agents detained him during the city's siege; in 1981 a bill sponsored by Tom Lantos, one of those he saved, made him the second honorary US citizen after Winston Churchill.

Japan's vice-consul Chiune Sugihara issued thousands of life-saving transit visas in 1940 from which country?

Lithuania's temporary capital, Kaunas, was Sugihara's post; the visas let refugees from occupied Poland cross the Soviet Union to Japan, and descendants of those he saved are estimated at 40,000 to 100,000.

Portugal's consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes defied Salazar by issuing thousands of visas in 1940 from which French city?

Bordeaux, with jurisdiction over the whole of south-western France, was his post as consul-general; Sousa Mendes was stripped of his career for disobeying Circular 14 and is now recognised as a national hero in Portugal.

Which British stockbroker's 1939 rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia stayed unknown until a 1988 TV reunion?

Nicholas Winton's story surfaced when the BBC's That's Life! seated him, unawares, among the grown-up children he had saved; he was knighted in 2003 and died aged 106 in 2015.

Which ghetto did the SS 'beautify' with sham shops and a school for a Red Cross inspection in June 1944?

Theresienstadt, in the garrison town of Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia, fooled the ICRC delegate Maurice Rossel, who reported that no one was being deported from it; the streets had been renamed and cleaned for the visit.

Which camp, opened in March 1933 for political prisoners, ran longer than any other in the Nazi system?

Dachau opened on 22 March 1933, weeks after Hitler took power, in a disused munitions factory outside Munich, and was liberated by US forces on 29 April 1945; the site is now a memorial open to the public.

Which camp on the Ettersberg hill above Weimar, Goethe's city, was liberated by the US Army in April 1945?

Buchenwald, 'beech forest', got its name because the SS felt 'Ettersberg' carried too many associations with Goethe, who had lived in Weimar; it was one of the first and largest camps inside Germany's pre-war borders, with 139 subcamps.

Which camp outside Lublin was captured nearly intact by the Red Army in July 1944, the first major camp liberated?

Majdanek fell so fast during Operation Bagration that the SS could not destroy its evidence; the Soviets protected the site at once, and by that autumn it was already a museum, the first of its kind. It gained national designation in 1965.

After a mass prisoner escape on 14 October 1943, the SS razed which camp and planted a pine forest over it?

Sobibór's revolt was planned by Leon Feldhendler and Red Army lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, a prisoner of war; the SS then dismantled the camp, levelled the area and disguised the ground as a farm.

Which author of the memoir Night won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and helped found the US Holocaust museum?

Elie Wiesel wrote 57 books, mostly in French and English, after surviving the camps as a teenager from Sighet in Romania; he went on to teach humanities at Boston University for decades.

Primo Levi, the Italian survivor who wrote If This Is a Man, worked in which profession before and after the war?

A chemist trained at the University of Turin, Levi later named each chapter of The Periodic Table, his collection of autobiographical stories, after a chemical element.

Which philosopher's New Yorker reports on the 1961 Jerusalem trial coined the phrase 'the banality of evil'?

Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from Germany, turned the articles into Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), arguing that the defendant was a thoughtless bureaucrat rather than a monster; the book remains fiercely debated.

Which US Supreme Court justice took leave to serve as chief American prosecutor at the 1945–46 Nuremberg trial?

Robert H. Jackson insisted that aggressive war itself be prosecuted and, at his suggestion, a Soviet proposal for 'crimes against civilians' was renamed 'crimes against humanity', a term the tribunal's charter wrote into law.

The Nuremberg Code on voluntary consent in medical research emerged from which of the later Nuremberg trials?

The Doctors' Trial (USA v. Brandt) delivered its verdict against Karl Brandt and 22 others on 20 August 1947, setting out the principles that became the Code, with explicit voluntary consent first among them.

Schindler's List was adapted from a Booker Prize-winning 1982 novel by which Australian author?

Thomas Keneally wrote Schindler's Ark after survivor Poldek Pfefferberg pressed the story on him in 1980; it was the first novel by an Australian to win the Booker and was later republished under the film's title.

Which director founded the Shoah Foundation in 1994 to film survivor testimony, a year after his Schindler's List?

Steven Spielberg set out to record 50,000 testimonies 'before it was too late'; the archive, now at the University of Southern California, holds more than 55,000 interviews and has since added survivors of other genocides.

In Art Spiegelman's Maus, which animal stands for the Poles, while Jews are mice and Germans are cats?

Pigs drew protests in Poland, where a consular official questioned Spiegelman about the insult when he applied for a research visa in 1987; Maus became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Which space shuttle carried a copy of 'Moon Landscape', drawn by teenage ghetto prisoner Petr Ginz, into orbit in 2003?

Columbia broke apart on re-entry on 1 February 2003, which would have been Ginz's 75th birthday; Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, the son of a survivor, had chosen the drawing from Yad Vashem's collection.

Which Polish paediatrician and children's author, refusing pleas to flee, moved into the Warsaw ghetto with his orphans?

Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, drafted a children's constitution in 1919 and was known across Poland as the 'Old Doctor'; he stayed with the children to the end when the orphanage was deported in August 1942.

The Oneg Shabbat archive, a secret record of Warsaw Ghetto life led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum, was buried in what?

Milk cans and metal boxes, three and ten respectively, were dug up after the war to yield some 6,000 documents running to 35,000 pages, now held by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Which Polish underground courier, who entered the Warsaw Ghetto in secret, briefed Roosevelt in person in July 1943?

Jan Karski was the first eyewitness to tell Roosevelt about the Holocaust, in the Oval Office on 28 July 1943, having earlier briefed Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in London; he later taught at Georgetown for decades.

Which Polish officer let himself be arrested in 1940 so he could be sent into Auschwitz and report from inside?

Witold Pilecki built a resistance network of hundreds of inmates and smuggled out reports that reached the Western Allies, then escaped in April 1943; back in Warsaw that August he began writing up his full account, Witold's Report.

Virtually all Jews survived in which Muslim-majority country, a fact often credited to its honour code of besa?

Albania's native Jews and almost all the foreign Jews who took refuge there came through the occupation; along with Denmark it was one of very few Axis-occupied countries where the majority of Jews were saved.

Which Axis ally halted deportation of its 48,000 Jewish citizens in March 1943 after protests led by Dimitar Peshev?

Bulgaria's deputies and public figures forced the halt, though the same government had already deported 11,343 Jews from the Greek and Yugoslav territories it occupied; the survival rate of its own Jews was among the highest in Axis Europe.

Which Asian port has been called the only place that unconditionally offered refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazis?

Shanghai took in more Jewish refugees than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India; in 1943 the Japanese occupiers confined about 23,000 of them to a square-mile 'designated area' in the Hongkou district.

Which island did a 1940 Nazi Foreign Office plan propose as a destination for deporting the Jews of Europe?

Madagascar, then a French colony, was proposed by Franz Rademacher of the Foreign Office in June 1940, shortly before the fall of France; France and Poland had themselves studied the island as a destination for Polish Jews in 1937.

From September 1941, Jews over the age of six in Germany and annexed Bohemia were ordered to wear what in public?

A yellow star badge bearing the word 'Jude' in mock-Hebrew lettering was the Reich's version; in occupied Poland the order had come earlier and took the form of a white armband with a blue star.

Which camp badge, worn by men imprisoned under Paragraph 175, was later reclaimed as a symbol of LGBT pride?

A pink triangle marked prisoners identified as homosexual; after liberation some were re-imprisoned by West Germany, which did not repeal the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 until 1969, and the 1970s revived the badge as a protest symbol.

Poland's parliament marks 2 August as a day of commemoration for the Porajmos, the genocide against which group?

Roma and Sinti were persecuted from 1933 onwards, and in occupied Yugoslavia, where Yad Vashem judges the genocide was most intense, the Ustaše regime all but wiped out the Romani population.

Auschwitz is the German name of which Polish town, whose army barracks were expanded into the camp in 1940?

Oświęcim, 33 kilometres south-east of Katowice near the Vistula, was a garrison town between the wars; the former barracks now form the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Hebrew word Shoah, Israel's standard term for the Holocaust, translates as what?

Catastrophe, or ruin, avoids the problem with 'holocaust', which comes from the Greek holokauston, a burnt offering to a god, an implication historian Walter Laqueur called 'singularly inappropriate'.

Which US general toured Ohrdruf in April 1945, then urged Washington to fly in journalists and congressmen as witnesses?

Dwight D. Eisenhower said he made the visit 'deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things' should anyone later call them propaganda; Ohrdruf was the first camp the US Army liberated.

The lakeside villa where the Wannsee Conference was held reopened on its fiftieth anniversary in 1992 as what?

A memorial and museum, the House of the Wannsee Conference, opened on 20 January 1992 after historian Joseph Wulf's 1965 proposal had been rejected by West Germany; the building had meanwhile served as a school.

Under what title did Anne Frank's writings from the annex appear in English in 1952, five years after the Dutch edition?

The Diary of a Young Girl was published by Doubleday in the United States and Vallentine Mitchell in Britain, and the attention it drew launched the diary's worldwide fame.

Which American journalist's Marseille network smuggled 2,000 refugees, Marc Chagall among them, out of Vichy France?

Varian Fry, working for the Emergency Rescue Committee against the wishes of his own government, was expelled after thirteen months and became the first American named Righteous Among the Nations.

Which postwar refugee ship, carrying 4,515 survivors to Palestine, was boarded by the Royal Navy and turned back?

Exodus 1947 had served as an accommodation ship for the D-Day landings before Aliyah Bet volunteers sailed her from France; the Royal Navy took her to Haifa and her passengers were eventually returned to Europe.