The
Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews by Adolf
Hitler and his henchmen during World War 2.
In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of
Europe that would be military occupied by Germany during the war. By
1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed by the
Nazis.
1.5 million children
were murdered. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish
children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of
handicapped children.
The Nazis here were the Horrors of Mankind,
Hitler's most ruthless henchmen - men often seen as the very
personifications of evil. A violent group of outsiders who rose
to power in a democracy and established political and economic
institutions of legitimized terror.
After the defeat of the Nazi Empire, Hitler’s apprehended henchmen
and collaborators were brought to trial in Nuremberg. The purpose: to
punish these criminals in the name of the six million Jews
exterminated by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.
The trial opened in Nov., 1945. Voluminous evidence was presented to
prove the plotting of aggressive warfare, the extermination of
civilian populations, especially the Jews, the widespread use of slave
labor, the looting of occupied countries, and the maltreatment and
murder of prisoners of war.
The trial lasted 11 months. Of the 21 defendants in custody (one
indicted Nazi, Martin Bormann, was indicted in absentia and was never
found), a total of 11 were sentenced to death, three were acquitted
and the rest received prison terms.
Ten men were hanged in November 1946; one of those sentenced to death,
Hermann Goering, cheated the gallows of Allied justice by committing
suicide in his prison cell shortly before the ten other condemned Nazi
leaders were hanged in Nuremberg gaol. He swallowed cyanide he had
concealed in a copper cartridge shell, while lying on a cot in his
cell.
The one-time Number Two man in the Nazi hierarchy was dead two hours
before he was scheduled to have been dropped through the trap door of
a gallows erected in a small, brightly lighted gymnasium in the gaol
yard, 35 yards from the cell block where he spent his last days of
ignominy.
/Louis Bülow
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