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“Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now?” — Anne Frank

In Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” he wrote of a “Jewish Conspiracy” to take over the world. Elected Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and as a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) called Nazis, he would take over total control upon President Hindenburg’s death in 1934 on a platform of German nationalism, racial purity, and global expansion (Lebensraum or “living space”).

The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in March 1933 to house political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. Under the control of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), anti-Semitism increased with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, leading to violence at Kristallnacht in November 1938, where 100 Jews were killed and thousands were arrested.

In September 1939, tens of thousands of Polish Jews were forced from their homes into ghettos. In 1941, having conquered Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, Jews and Gypsies were transported to Polish ghettos and then to concentration camps. All Jews were marked with a yellow star.

As Germany invaded Russia, mobile killing units, known as Einsatzgruppen, would murder 800,000 to 1.4 million Soviet Jews. At the 1942 Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Reinhard Heydrich would come up with Endlösung, the “Final Solution.” Extermination camps or killing centers would be established in six locations in Poland, with the first mass gassing in March 1942 at Bełżec, followed by Chelmno, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Majdanek. At the largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, an estimated 1.1 to 1.3 million were murdered.

Altogether, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, almost two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. After the war, death camp commandants and high-level Nazi leaders, including Adolf Eichmann, would be captured, tried, and executed. Jewish survivors seeking a new homeland would lead to the creation of Israel in 1948.

The primary artifact in the American Heritage Museum’s Holocaust exhibit is the WWII German cattle car. This 1903 rail car was imported to the United States by the American Heritage Museum from Nuremberg, Germany in the summer of 2023 and has undergone a complete restoration. This 30-foot-long, two-axle freight wagon is the type used by the Nazi regime for the inhumane transportation of millions of innocent Jewish people and other persecuted groups to concentration camps and extermination sites across Europe from 1933 to 1945.

A Promise Kept – VR Experience

The American Heritage Museum has partnered with the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center to show an extraordinary virtual reality experience about Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Fritzie Fritzshall. In 1944, thirteen-year-old Fritzie, her mother, and her two younger brothers were arrested at gunpoint and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Separated from her mother and brothers during selection, never to see them again, Fritzie survived for months inside one of the Nazi’s most notorious camps. Imprisoned with 599 other women, each night the women would share with Fritzie a precious crumb of their bread in the hope that the youngest among them might survive to tell the world what had happened to them. In turn, Fritzie promised that if she survived, she would tell their story.

Filmed on location in Poland and Ukraine, A Promise Kept combines storytelling, immersive cinematography, animation, photogrammetry and 360 sound, as viewers stand with Fritzie as she journeys back to the grounds of her grandparents’ home, to the arrival ramp, crematorium, barracks, and latrines of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The VR experience can be watched by scheduling in advance or on availability during open hours. We can take up to 12 people per fifteen-minute showing. To schedule an appointment call (978) 562-9182.