near Lublin, Klooga in Estonia, and the ghettos at Lvov, Riga, Kovno, and Vilna. These trials were precursors of the Nuremberg and Allied national trials in 1945 and thereafter.

Ronald Smelser is Professor of History at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Endnotes

1. For background on the various war fronts under discussion, see John Keegan, The Second World War (New York, 1989); Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World War (New York, 1972); and Martin Gilbert, The Second World War, rev. ed. (New York, 1991). Specifically for a discussion of the eastern front, see Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War, 1941-45 (London, 1971). For the relationship between Nazi ideology and the war, see Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War (Oxford, 1992). For a useful chronology, see Cesare Salmaggi and Alfredo Pallavisini, comps., 2194 Days of War (New York, 1977).

2. Seaton, Russo-German War, 394.

3. Ibid., 464.

4. Salmaggi and Pallavisini, Days of War, 529-30.

5. Ibid., 554.

6. Ibid., 572-73. 7. Ibid., 637.

8. For treatment of the Holocaust, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed. (New York, 1985); Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York, 1982); Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York, 1986); Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945 (New York, 1990); and Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York, 1986). 9. Gilbert, Holocaust, 657.

10. Gilbert, Second World War, 508.

11. Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley, 1984), 155.

12. The original document is reproduced in Serge Klarsfeld, Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy, trans. Kenneth Jacobson (New York, 1985), 94; and Brendan Murphy, The Butcher of Lyon: The Story of the Infamous Nazi Klaus Barbie (New York, 1983), 185. Although Barbie's report noted forty-one children, he classified three teenage children as "adult staff members." In fact, there were forty-four children. 13. Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York, 1993), 190.

14. Gilbert, Second World War, 549.

15. Lucjan Dobroszyski, ed., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven, 1984), 503-4.

16. Ibid., 534.

17. Gilbert, Holocaust, 654.

18. Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (New York, 1987), 184-85. 19. For general information on Eichmann and his team, see Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer (Vienna and Zurich, 1993); for Brunner's boast, see p. 309.

20. On continuing euthanasia, see Ernst Klee, “Euthenasie" im NS-Staat: Die "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens" (Frankfurt, 1983), esp. 417-56.

21. Gilbert, Holocaust, 760.

22. On Nazi use of slave labor, see Edward Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 1967), esp. 267; also, Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des "Ausländer-Einsatzes" in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches, 2d ed. (Bonn, 1986).

23. Gilbert, Holocaust, 699.

24. Rudolf Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant of Auschwitz, ed. Steven Paskuly, trans. Andrew Pollinger (New York, 1992), 168.

25. Zuccotti, Italians, 172ff.

26. Zuccotti, French, 190ff.

27. For general information on America's role in rescue, see Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington, Ind., 1987); Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New York, 1980); and David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York, 1984).

28. Wyman, Abandonment, 209.

29. David S. Wyman, ed., America and the Holocaust, 13 vols. (New York, 1989), 10:160.

30. Ibid., 7:348.

31. Wyman, Abandonment, 219. 32. See Wyman, America, 7:379–405. 33. Ibid., 10:115.

34. Ibid., 174.

35. Wyman, Abandonment, 266-67.

36. For documentation on the Fort Niagara shelter, see Karen J. Greenberg, ed., Columbia University Library, New York: The Varian Fry Papers and the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter Papers, vol. 5 of Archives of the Holocaust, ed. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (New York and London, 1990); also, "Refugees Arrive from Europe", Life, 21 Aug. 1944, 25ff.

37. See Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York, 1986).

38. For an exhaustive study of the Holocaust in Hungary, see Randolph Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. (New York, 1981).

39. On the role of Eichmann's Sondereinsatzkommando in Hungary, see Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer, 293-307.

40. Hilberg, Destruction, 529.

41. Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer, 296. 42. Gilbert, Holocaust, 663.

43. Ibid., 682.

44. Washington, D.C., National Archives, Record Group 226, Entry 191, Box 1: Office of Strategic Services (OSS) report "The Jews in Hungary," 19 Oct. 1944, p. 22. 45. Gilbert, Holocaust, 752.

46. National Archives, Record Group 84, Bern Legation, AIS, Gen. Recs. 1942-1947, Box 74, 840.1 Jews-Hungary: Leland Harrison, Bern, to Elmer Davis, State Department, 25 May 1944, p. 2; also, OSS report "Jews in Hungary," 24. 47. For general information on Wallenberg's mission and the other rescue attempts, see Braham, Politics of Genocide, vol. 2, chap. 31; Wyman, Abandonment, chap. 13; and Hilberg, Destruction, 510-54.

The chronology lists the major events of the Holocaust and World War II in 1944. It also includes less important happenings as revealing illustrations of the developments during that year. As you consider the chronology, keep in mind that it includes some information unknown to the American people in 1944. The Holocaust occurred behind German lines, and the killing centers were located in obscure places.

The deportation and mass killing of European Jews continued throughout 1944. In the first four months, the Germans arrested and deported more Jews from France than in any comparable period in 1943. Deportations also continued from Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece, and resumed in Slovakia. In Italy Jews, part-Jews, and Jews in mixed marriages were deported via transit camps such as Fossoli, Bolzano-Gries, and the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste. Until early 1944 Hungary was a relative island of calm insofar as Jews were concerned. In spite of German pressure, they were largely left alone by the government of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy and Prime Minister Miklós Kállay. This changed with the German occupation of Hungary in March. Of the 762,000 Jews living in Hungary on March 9, 1944, 479,000 persons were killed or died after deportation and labor service, 5,000 escaped, and 139,000 Jews survived in Hungary. In the Warthegau area of Poland, the Lodz ghetto was dissolved and liquidated with nearly 70,000 Jews transported to Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Although many western and eastern transit, labor, and concentration camps were liberated in 1944, new concentration camps were opened at BolzanoGries in Italy, the Melk subcamp of Mauthausen in Austria, and Dora, a subcamp of Buchenwald inside Germany.

In 1944 American and British forces liberated the western capitals of Paris, Brussels, and Rome; and the adjacent transit and concentration camps at Drancy, Gurs, Vittel, and Natzweiler Struthof in France, and the camps at Breendonck and Malines (Mechelen) in Belgium. In Italy the transit camp at Fossoli was evacuated in early August, when the Allied advance and partisan attacks reached north-central Italy. Similarly, the Soviets liberated the Majdanek concentration camp and killing center in Lublin as well as ghettos and labor and concentration camps in Russia, the Ukraine,

and the Baltic at localities like Lvov, Odessa, Riga, Vilna, Kovno, and Klooga.

There was an appreciable increase in resistance activities, including uprisings in Warsaw and Slovakia, and strikes in Denmark, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as the failure of the July 1944 plot in Germany against Adolf Hitler. Significant Jewish and Gypsy resistance also occurred at the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where revolts occurred in the Theresienstadt family camp and the Gypsy family camp, and members of the Sonderkommando blew up one crematorium. In 1944 German reprisals and massacres in the French village at Oradour and the Marzabotto plateau in Tuscany, Italy, led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, including several Jews in hiding.

The euthanasia program expanded in 1944 to include the killing of tubercular forced laborers from Poland and the Soviet Union in German hospitals and sanitaria. Further, homosexuals, political dissidents, and Jehovah's Witnesses were arrested and deported to concentration camps, where many were vulnerable to deplorable conditions and medical experiments.

The year 1944 also saw the creation of the War Refugee Board in the United States and the growing awareness of the need to rescue survivors to already-liberated territory in North Africa and even to the United States, where the Fort Ontario emergency rescue "shelter" was established in upstate New York. American response continued to be limited to press coverage and official statements, since the liberation of Europe after the landings at Normandy was the main focus of military effort. In addition, 1944 witnessed the first major trials of Nazi criminals at Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin and the creation of the Majdanek memorial museum in late fall.

All in all, 1944 was a complex year, continuing the persecution and genocide of the years before 1944, but also revealing the first signs of hope in the liberation and evacuation of eastern and western concentration camps as well as the first prosecution of Nazi criminals by Allied tribunals. Moreover, there was a growing awareness of the new postwar problems of assisting displaced persons still trapped in the liberated concentration camps.