While the father of psychoanalysis managed to escape from Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938, four of his sisters died in the camps. Three of them were gassed in Treblinka
Today, the Nazi persecution of Jewish people is widely viewed through the prism of the death camps: places such as Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz. Yet before Auschwitz was even conceived as a centre of mass murder, more than a million people had been killed across eastern Europe. This is the story of the early stages of the Holocaust, when a campaign of appalling abuse and brutality became an explicit policy of annihilation. BY JAMES BULGIN
In July 1942, Nazi Germany ordered the systematic extermination of the Jewish population in the Polish capital of Warsaw. Jews had been confined to the Warsaw Ghetto from November 1940, life was terrible. In the Ghetto to the northwest of the city some 450,000 men, women, and children lived crammed together behind the high walls. Around 100,000 people had died of hunger or disease, or been killed in summary executions. But the worse was to come on 22 July 1942.
In July 1942, the SS launched its operation to systematically exterminate the Jews of Warsaw. A march to commemorate this genocide is taking place in Poland on Friday.