See Netherlands.

In the Jewish people’s long history of martyrdom, the catastrophe that eventuated from the six years of Nazi conquest in Europe between 1939 and 1945 was unprecedented in suffering and death. The Jewish people lost more than 6 million people, or two-thirds of its European community, and one-third of the entire Jewish people.

On February 24, 1920, an ex-corporal in the German army named Adolf Hitler and a group of professional antisemitic agitators, including Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, and Gottfried Feder, met in a Munich beer hall and founded the National Socialist Party. (Streicher and Rosenberg were later sentenced to death by hanging by the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg in October 1946. Hitler escaped the world’s verdict by committing suicide in his private bunker in Berlin at the end of April 1945.)

Nazi Program. The core of the National Socialist Party (Nazi) program was the racist doctrine that “only he in whose veins German blood flows” might be considered a citizen of Germany, and therefore “no Jew can belong to the German nation.” Antisemitism was the emotional foundation of the Nazi movement; every member of the Nazi party was an antisemite.

Hitler, the Fuehrer, or dictatorial leader, of the Nazi Party, announced his antisemitism as well as his inhumanity proudly: “Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be barbarians! It is an honorable title. We shall rejuvenate the world! This world is near its end