EXACTLY What Percentage of Jews Were Killed in the Holocaust?

Factual Questions
21

German Nazism was much more extreme than Italian fascism in a lot of ways, and even though Mussolini was anti-semitic himself, Italian fascism as a whole wasn’t, and there were actually a bunch of Italian Jewish fascists in the early party. In fact three of the fascist blackshirts who were killed in the early fights with Socialist and Communist gangs, Gino Bolaffi, Bruno Mondolfo and Duilio Sinigaglia, were all Jews, and about 200 Jews participated in the march on Rome.

And there were Jews in the Fascist Italian government. Aldo Finzi, one of the members of the first Fascist Grand Council was Jewish, as was Dante Almansi, Vice Chief of Police, Guido Jung, the Finance Minister from 1932-1935, and Maurizio Rava was the governor of Somalia. One of Mussolini’s mistresses, Margherita Sarfatti, who was also active in “legitimizing” Fascism, was Jewish.

The Italian government didn’t really become anti-semitic until after the invasion of Ethiopia, when they were condemned by the League of Nations, and Germany was really their only choice as an ally. At that point, the government realized it would have to make concessions to German attitudes and moved to a more anti-semitic policy.

But if you look at the situation, Italy became fascist in 1922. It wasn’t until 1938, 16 years later, that it passed the “Laws for the Defense of the Race”, which forbade Jews from going to public schools, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews, banned Jewish ownership of land, kicked Jews out of the army and civil service, and so on. Compare that to Nazi Germany where the Nazis took power in 1933 and passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, just two years later.

The other thing to remember was that the Nazis in Germany had substantially more public support than the Italian fascists.

22

I can’t be specific or give a cite, so I guess my answer is nothing more than ‘anecdote’, but I am certain that certain ultra-orthodox sects were annihilated, totally wiped out. I’m referring to those where the entire sect lived in a small area, over a few villages. Phrased differently, ultra-orthodox sects can sometimes form around a specific individual, typically a rabbi of particular intellect, passion, or persuasion. It’s easy to see how such a sect can be confined to a very small, limited area. Unfortunately, it’s then also easy to see how it can be wiped out. Remember, many, many Jewish villages (especially in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus) suffered complete, literally 100% loss of their populations.

Here’s a picture of a wonderful memorial from the Treblinka extermination camp. Each rock represents a village or town that’s gone, its name etched on the stone.

(BTW, the Jews are most definitely not a race. They share a common religion, that’s it. Hitler promulgated the notion that Jews were a race, that “Jewishness” was in the genes. Hence, conversion to Christianity was not a solution. Only extermination would do).

23

Well, about 96% of the Jewish population of Thessilonica was wiped out, if that’s what you mean.

24

Race is not a very popular term nowadays, but that’s mostly wrong.

25

Sorry, what’s wrong? My statement? Yours? That race is not a popular term? Colour me :confused:

26

Sorry for being unclear/curt. I meant to say that Judaism, or perhaps “Jewishness”, is as much an ethnicity as a religion.

27

That you have to be religious to be a Jew. You can be an atheist and still be Jewish. It’s as much a culture/ethnicity as a religion.

28

We wind up getting into this on every thread concerning Judaism, but I need to stress forcefully that it is a religion, not an ethnicity.

You’re thinking of a cultural group that may be best expressed as Yiddish. The Yiddish came from a variety of Eastern European nations mostly within what became the USSR. Their immigration to America created the stereotype of Jewishness.

This has little to do with the religion. Sephardic Jews don’t correspond to the Yiddish stereotype. Ethiopian Jews do not. Chinese Jews do not. Arabian Jews do not. There have been thriving Jewish cultures in all portions of world for hundreds if not thousands of years that would be puzzled by being considered a common ethnicity.

For that matter, how many Jews in Western Europe think of themselves as having an ethnicity in common?

That Jewishness is an ethnicity seems to me to be a trope that occurs only in America and possibly among some in Israel. Even in America there were huge divides between the middle to upper class immigrants from Germany who started arriving in the mid-19th century and the lower class immigrants from Eastern Europe who started arriving a generation later. The Germans were not subject to the depth of prejudice from Christian Americans and were horrified to find themselves lumped in with the lower class immigrants that became what Christian America thought of as Jewish.

It was the success of these Jews in Germany (and in other European nations: Germans hardly had a monopoly on anti-Semitism) that made the Nazis so determined to eradicate them. It made it easier from their point of view to be able to lump all Jews together even though there were huge ethnic differences among them.

Jewishness was a matter of strict definition involving ancestry and paperwork. Peoples’ looks, culture, language, or customs had little to do with the matter. Your birth papers stamped you as a Jew, because that was how your religion was recorded.

I’m sure that many modern day Americans proclaim themselves to be ethnically Jewish or to retain their Jewishness even if they stop believing in God. Fortunately, those of us in America can allow them to proclaim and believe anything they please. But there is simply no worldwide or historic truth to the statement. Judaism is a religion. Period. Ask Sammy Davis, Jr. or Rod Carew. :slight_smile:

29

Well, yes and no. The only definition that really counts is being the child of a Jewish mother. I suppose that’s not a religion, but neither is it a race. So, you bring up a good point and frankly, now that you and Shmendrik have got me thinking about it, I’m not sure what the right answer is.

30

I’m really not sure what you mean by “Yiddish Stereotype”. A large majority of American Jews are of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. They share a common genetic heritage - hence there is a stereotypical Jewish look, and more importantly certain genetic diseases which occur far more often in the Ashkenazi Jewish community.

Yes, obviously Sephardic Jews and other groups are not as closely related to Ashkenazic Jews, although genetic research has shown that they share relatively recent (<2000 years) common decent.

Yes, of course Judaism is a religion, and people of any ethnicity can convert to it, etc. That makes the situation considerably more complex, but it does not justify your statement that “Judaism is a religion. Period.”

31

Italy and Germany were’t the tightest of allies. For example, Mussolini was very upset with Britain and France over the Munich Agreement. Mussolini was worried about an overly powerful Germany for the same reasons other countries were. Mussolini didn’t want to be Germany’s puppet.

There was also some resentment to the Nazi party. The Italian Fascists were in power a whole decade before the Nazis and the Italians resented the fact that the Nazis were getting all the attention. As far as Mussolini was concerned, Germany’s Nazis were a johnny-come-late pale comparison to the true Fascists in Italy.

The Italian Fascists weren’t as anti-Sematic as the Nazis were. And, Mussolini didn’t want to be pushed around by Germany. There were official rules about Jews having to report to interment camps, but local officials and residents simply ignored those orders. As far as Mussolini was concerned, he wasn’t going to kill Italians to satisfy Hitler. Most of the 8,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust happened in Nazi occupied Italy.

From the Jewish Virtual Library:

Another interesting note. Denmark’s Jews were not attacked for most of the war even though Denmark was actually under German occupation. Germany wanted to make Denmark a showcase of a fellow European Arian state that gets along with Germany and allowed Denmark to remain more or less self governing. The Danes understood this and did their best to represent a united front against the Nazi occupiers.

Gobels decided not to press the Danes into arresting and deporting their Jews. The Germans needed Denmark to be quasi-independent and to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers.

The Germans did think of setting up a fascist government in Denmark, but the Fascist party in Denmark received less than 2% of the vote in the 1943 election. Danish cooperation with the Nazis started to end in the middle of that year. The Germans were upset with the anti-German feel of the election, and the Danes who could finally see the defeat of Germany in the air became less cooperative.

Germany finally made some demands that the Danes refused to meet (censorship laws with German oversight, laws banning unions and assembly, the introduction of the death penalty, and allowing German military courts to oversee the Danish courts) As a result, the Germans dissolved the Danish government. However, before the Germans had a chance to deport the Danish Jews, the Danes helped almost all of them escape to Sweden.

32

actually, I would like to point out that the case of Italy and Jews is not unique. Hungary and Romania, the lesser known but more valuable German allies, were not very keen on Holocaust also. In Hungary, in particular, Holocaust happened only in 1944 when Germany occupied them (btw that’s also the time of Raul Wallenberg’s work, and he was so successful precisely because he was saving people from quick deportation/death immediately before the coming Soviet advance which ended the persecution). In Romania there seems to have never been direct German occupation but they had their own limited genocide, limited probably in part by lack of enthusiasm; on a related note I recall reading that in the occupied Ukraine Romanian soldiers were (andecdotally) considered to be much less of a threat to Jews than German ones. In generally friendly Spain there was no genocide at all, and in fact some Spanish diplomats became “righteous among the nations” while working under Franco’s low key directions to give Jews visas.

So basically Holocaust was a long, drawn out process if you look at it on the European scale. Some groups were lucky because they had more time to flee (e.g. lots of German Jews emigrated before the war), some were lucky because persecution started late in the war and was ended by the Russian advance, some were lucky because they were in Soviet Union and could flee to the east.

Then again others, as in Poland or Greece, were quickly rounded up and had absolutely nowhere to go. Likewise those who did not flee east in western Soviet Union when there was time - the locals usually handed them out to Germans or killed them themselves.

33

How strange that it was late in the war, when the Soviets were coming down on them from the east like a steamroller (aided by a bit of activity in the west), that the Germans seemed to step up the Holocaust in relatively recently occupied territories like Hungary, Denmark and northern Italy. I wonder if anyone has ever examined the personnel and material involved and analyzed whether abandoning the Holocaust, rather than stepping up the effort, could have made a difference to Germany’s war efforts in 1944-45? Not to mention the question of why they accelerated extermination efforts rather than diverting resources to fighting.

34

Right. The only German allies (to be distinguished from German occupied territory, where the Germans could pretty much do what they wanted without regard to local sentiment) where you saw enthusiastic cooperation by the governments to participate in the Holocaust were Slovakia, Croatia, and Vichy France. The rest fairly eagerly turned over “foreign” Jews, but were less enthusiastic about murdering native Jews.

35

It makes sense to me. They had access to the Jews of the newly occupied territories for the first time. Besides, in 1944, the Germans knew pretty clearly they weren’t going to win the war, whatever they did. So they had to step up extermination efforts. They no longer had the luxury of time. If they were going to wipe out European Jewry, they had to do it now.

36

The discussion has moved on, but on the question of whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity, I suggest: Can you be an atheist and still be Jewish? - The Straight Dope

Basically, it’s both. One can convert and become Jewish, which makes it a religion. But one can be born into Judaism without having any religion (I know many Jews who are profound atheists or agnostics) which makes it an ethnicity. In any case, not a race.

37

Large numbers of Jews and other prisoners were used as slave labor, freeing up Germans to serve in the troops. Much of this slave labor was worked to death, so the end result was the same, but the Germans got utility out of these roundups.

Dex, the problem with your column is the same as with Shmendrik’s argument. (Huge Peter S. Beagle fan am I, I hasten to add, assuming it’s the same reference since it’s misspelled.) It’s circular, beginning and ending with the same group of people rather than looking at Jewry across all cultures. That Ethiopian Jews identify as Jews is not the same as their identifying as an ethnicity.

What you need to do is to look at what aspects a group shares other than religion to give it a common identity. As far as I can tell, the only aspects are those Eastern European customs I call Yiddish culture, which apply only to a fraction of even American Jews and hardly at all elsewhere. If a collection of believers share nothing in common than their religion I can’t see how it is possible to label them an ethnicity.

That many self-identify as an ethnicity is interesting, to be sure. The only parallel I can think of is race-based, in which some African-Americans claim a culture outside of their skin color and some Hispanic-Americans claim a culture outside of their language. Many don’t and vehemently deny that they should be all lumped together based on this one characteristic. Perhaps Jewish-American has become an ethnicity in a way that Jewish has not. I’m doubtful, though, and I think there is too much individual variation to make this claim.

38

What they have in common is that they all think of themselves as Jews. Or to put it another way, what they have in common is that *other people *think of them all as Jews.

If it helps, think of it as a club or as a political construct. I prefer the term “people” - as in “the Jewish People” - myself; it’s the best translation for the Hebrew term we use for ourself, Ahm.

39

How much support did the Italian Fascists have, initially? I checked up and just see some stuff about controversial elections and changes to the laws in the early 20s. IIRC, the Nazis had just over a third of the vote* and leveraged a coalition government into a power grab and martial law.

*After Hitler was installed as Chancellor he did get up to mid-high 40s before voting ceased.

40

In 1922, when Mussolini marched on Rome and became Prime Minister, the Fascists controlled 35 seats out of 355, so about 10%. In the next elections in 1923, they got about 65% of the vote.