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U.S. troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in west central
Germany on April 12, 1945. Germany had built its first concentration camps in
March 1933, shortly after the Nazi party had come to power. Throughout the
1930's, the Germans strove to eliminate Jewish people from Germany. The 1935
Nuremburg Laws denied Jews their civil and political rights. One night in
November 1938, Germany erupted in anti-Jewish violence. On the Kristalinacht,
or "Night of Breaking Glass," Germans burned hundreds of synagogues, destroyed
Jewish shops, and beat Jews in streets. Shortly thereafter, the Nazi government
sent 50,000 Jews to concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. Built in
1937, Buchenwald was one of twenty such places the Germans constructed in
Germany, Poland, France, and Czechoslovakia as labor or extermination camps. In
1941, Germany decided to rid itself entirely of Jews, sending them to Auschwitz
and other concentration camps in Poland. As Nazi Germany overran Europe, it
sent the Jewish citizens of occupied countries to concentration camps. An
estimated six million people--Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the insane, Jehovah's
Witnesses, and others--died in these camps.
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