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  • By the end of 1942 the Germans had already murdered millions of Jews, but there were

  • still remaining before them many Jews, more millions, all over Europe and North Africa

  • who they wanted to capture and to bring to the murder centers in order to kill them.

  • And they embarked on that mission during the course of 1943 and the subsequent years until

  • the end of World War II, where the murder did not stop until the end of the war.

  • Auschwitz became ultimately the largest and most industrialized murder center of the entire

  • history. Auschwitz came online fully during the course of 1943. All of the gas chambers

  • at Birkenau, the murder center of Auschwitz-Birkenau, were online by the summer of 1943 and were

  • now prepared to kill all these arriving Jews: Jews from Greece, Jews from Italy, and the

  • peak - the Jews from Hungary. In the course of the spring and summer of 1944, some 437,000

  • Jews from Hungary were brought to Auschwitz and nearly all of them killed upon arrival,

  • in a period of just 8 weeks.

  • Ultimately Auschwitz murdered more than a million people, nearly all of them Jews. As

  • the Red Army approached Auschwitz, the Germans shut down the murder operation to Auschwitz

  • and they marched out the majority of the remaining prisoners, some 57,000 approximately, in a

  • death march through the snow without any previsions, shooting thousands on the way as they marched

  • them towards Germany, Only a few thousands were remaining in the camp itself when the

  • Soviets arrived on January 27th of 1945.

  • So if we come to sum up the Holocaust, we can say that the Nazis achieved some of their

  • goals, but they did not achieve all of their goals. They murdered 6 million Jews, the Jews

  • have never replenished their numerical numbers. If before the war there were between 16 and

  • 17 million Jews, at the end of World War II there were fewer than 11 million. And today,

  • at the peak of Jewish growth since World War II, there are approximately 13 million Jews

  • in the world. They seriously damaged aspects of Jewish culture - Ladino and Yiddish and

  • other things. They wiped out Jewish communities that have never been reconstituted, and have

  • been essentially wiped off the map. In that sense the Nazis achieved some of their goals

  • but the Nazis also failed because the Jewish people are still here. The Jewish people did

  • not win World War II, the Jewish people survived World War II, but in that survival lies the

  • Nazi failure.

By the end of 1942 the Germans had already murdered millions of Jews, but there were

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