Holocaust Memorial Education Center
Shimon and Sara Birnbaum Jewish Community Center
The Outbreak of World War II and Anti-Jewish Policy
“There are in this part of the world [Eastern and Central Europe] 6,000,000 Jews… for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter.”
Chaim Weizmann
The beginning of World War II, on September 1, 1939, marked a new phase in German policy toward the Jews.
After the conquest of Poland, the Jews of Eastern Europe were concentrated in ghettos, while in Western Europe the Jews were registered and dispossessed of their property. Antisemitic racial legislation was passed in North Africa too. In South-Eastern European countries Jews were drafted into forced labor by collaborationist governments and tens of thousands of Jews there perished.
World War II transformed the face of Europe and the entire world, and resulted in the killing of millions of civilians of different nationalities and the evolution of a satanic scheme of genocide.
