Both prior to the war and throughout the war years, the Nazis continuously depicted the Jews as "vermin" and as "sub-human." Their propaganda machine produced endless articles, caricatures, and films portraying Jews as greedy, grasping people who secretly "ruled the world," or as criminals who should be exterminated. It did not matter that the events of the war years proved decisively that the Jews were poor, weak, and powerless. In many countries of Europe, the inhabitants were rewarded for handing over Jews who had not yet been arrested. Here and there, however, some Europeans did risk their freedom, and even their lives, in order to help Jews and help conceal them from their Nazi oppressors. In Denmark, the king himself declared that he and the entire population would wear the yellow star, in sympathy with the Jews.
The Nazis used special terms, or euphemisms, to disguise their intentions and their treatment of the Jews. These constituted a "code," which sounded fairly harmless to those — including the victims — who were not fully aware of their real meaning. Thus, the cattle trucks and trains in which Jews were sent to the concentration camps were only "transports." Jews who had been designated for death in the camps underwent a "selection process," and the mass murders in the gas chambers constituted "special treatment." The total annihilation of the Jews of Europe was the "final solution of the Jewish problem." Clearly, throughout World War II, from September 1939 until June 1945, Europe was ravaged by incessant war, its human andnatural resources used by the German occupiers for their own ends, its cities bombarded and laid waste, and its population terrorized. By the time that the war had ended, millions of people had been killed or made homeless, exiled from their homes and separated from their families. Meanwhile, the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis continued steadily and with brutal efficiency throughout all this chaos. When the war ended, the Jewish populations of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, France, Holland, Yugoslavia, and part of Russia, embodying a unique and age-old culture, had been virtually wiped out.
