Beyond Numbers: Connecting Threads of Remembrance
in Data from Polish Holocaust Victims

Place of Birth, Place of Residence, or Place During the War 1941

Nils H. Roemer Director, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies
Katie Fisher, Research Assistant, Belofsky Fellow
Yannis Soonjung Kwon, Undergraduate Research Apprentice
Siddhant Somani, Research Analyst
Digvijaysinh Gohil, Research Analyst

1941 was a pivotal, transitional year bridging the initial mass murders of the Holocaust and the codification of extermination in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Even before the gas chambers and extermination camps that are usually imagined when referring to the Holocaust, Nazi Germany was organizing massive deportations, perpetrating violence, and inciting local hatred of the Jews to destroy Jewish communities in Poland and across Eastern Europe.

Since Germany’s occupation of Poland in 1939, Polish Jews had been subjugated to forced labor, violence, and ghettoization, and thousands had already been murdered by disease, starvation, and cruelty. By 1941, 200 labor camps had been established across Poland, and the ghettos in Krakow and Lublin were established in March. Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June resulted in the Nazi occupation of all former USSR-controlled territories where the Einsatzgruppen swiftly began perpetrating mass shootings against Jewish populations. In September, mass deportations from German territories exacerbated the overcrowding and cruelty that the Jews in Poland were enduring. By October 1941, it is estimated that the Jewish deaths in the newly captured territories numbered 150,000. In December, Chelmno became the first of the six extermination camps to begin its gassing operations.

The Nazis were not lone perpetrators in violence across Poland in 1941. There are recorded instances of Polish populations perpetrating pogroms against their Jewish neighbors in the interim period between the withdrawal of Soviet Control and the occupation of the Nazis following the launch of Operation Barbarossa. The arriving Einsatzgruppen had received orders to tolerate and even encourage the locals to launch pogroms, and auxiliary Polish units aided in the ghettoization and murder of the Jews.

This case study indicates the murder of 371,516 individuals in 1941 from Poland alone. Still, it does not account for the thousands of individuals who were survived by no one to remember and submit their testimonies, nor the thousands being murdered in mass shootings and pogroms in other Eastern European countries. Much of the information that was submitted to Yad Vashem is blank, as many of these deaths were much more chaotic and sporadic than in the later years. However, the causes of death that are known indicate the conditions of the ghetto and the violence perpetrated by local Poles, and in many cases by the victim’s own neighbors.