Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after liberation. |
Adolf Hitler's diplomatic and military victories by the end of 1941
put all European Jewry, including the core of some nine million
living in Poland and the western Soviet Union, in jeopardy. Nazi
members and
local security units shot over one million before
Reinhardt Heydrich, deputy leader of the , proposed the
"final
solution" ( Endlösung ) early in 1942. Jews were sent to concentration
camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor to be gassed to death
on arrival or worked to exhaustion and then killed. Well over six
million people died, including others on the extinction list --
Gypsies and other minorities, the mentally incompetent and the
physically crippled.
Hitler began to implement
his theories of racial superiority and to deprive German Jews of the
privileges of full citizenship soon after coming to power early in 1933. Those trying to
escape were
frustrated by immigration restrictions in the Western democracies,
including Canada, which took only a very small number of Jewish
refugees.
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