Immediate aftermath of the Holocaust |
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As World War II was drawing to a close and the Germans were retreating on all fronts, they continued to kill as many Jews as possible before their time was finally up. Many Jews that were still confined in Jewish ghettos that had been converted in to labor camps as forced labour were murdered. Those that did not were sent to the extermination centers that were still in operation, or to Reich labor and concentration camps on death marches. Many of the inmates died of starvation and exhaustion as a result or were either murdered.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews somehow managed to survive the war, either in the camps or hiding as well as many that were in the Soviet Union. On returning to their homes, they were often met with anger and animosity by their neighbours. In Poland alone, antisemitic gangs murdered approximately 1,500 Jewish survivors in the first months after the liberation. No surprise then that hundreds of thousands more Jews fled westwards and gathered in camps in Austria, Germany and Italy. Approximately 100,000 Jewish persons that had been displaced by the war immigrated to Canada, the United States, Australia and the Latin American countries. Many Holocaust survivors tried to reach Eretz Israel after World War II but the British authorities deported them to detention camps in Cyprus. When the State of Israel was established, the gates for mass immigration were opened for the survivors of the Holocaust.
Tens of thousands of Germans and their collaborators were tried and sentenced in trials against Nazi war criminals. Sadly, most of the individuals who carried out the atrocities, to this day have never been brought to justice. Only 31,651 Nazi war criminals out of the hundreds of thousands active during the war were brought to trial between 1945 and 1949. |