Philipson Warech Jewish Heritage Collection

Holocaust

Miscellaneous Holocaust Artifacts

A small, rotating selection of the Philipson Collection's vast Holocaust archive.

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its far too many collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Rooted in centuries-old anti-Judaism and intensified by Nazi racial ideology, the campaign against Jews began with discrimination, propaganda, and legal restrictions before escalating into widespread violence, forced deportations, and mass murder during World War II.

Across German-occupied Europe, Jews were stripped of their rights, exiled to ghettos, and deported to camps where—if they were not starved or worked to death—they were murdered en masse. While Jews were the primary victims, millions of others—including Roma and Sinti people, political prisoners, disabled individuals, and other targeted groups—were also persecuted and murdered. The Holocaust remains one of the most devastating examples of how prejudice, propaganda, and authoritarian power can culminate in genocide.

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Important Moments

1933

Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. The Nazi government quickly begins implementing anti-Jewish policies, including boycotts of Jewish businesses, book burnings, and laws excluding Jews from public life.

1939-1941

Following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Jews across occupied Europe are forced into ghettos and subjected to increasingly brutal conditions. Mobile killing units begin mass shootings of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

1935

Germany enacts the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of German citizenship and prohibiting marriage or relationships between Jews and non-Jews, formally codifying anti-Jewish racial policies.

1942-195

Nazi leaders implement the “Final Solution,” a coordinated plan to murder Europe’s Jews through extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. Allied forces begin liberating camps in 1944–1945, revealing the full scale of the atrocities.

Highlights from the Collection

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(Front) In Germany and German-occupied areas, Jewish people were required to identify themselves on any letters they mailed, as well as other legal documents, by adding “Israel” (for men) or “Sara” (for women) as middle names. This was required so that Nazi officials could sensor Jewish mail, as you can see by the postal censor tape. This envelope contained a letter written in 1941 to someone in Florida. The sender, a Jewish man, wrote “Israel” after his first name on the return address.

A photo of a March 1943 memorial in Madison Square Garden for “Jews martyred in Europe.” 34,000 people attended the event.

A Nazi soldier and a Romani family. We don’t know who these people were or what their story is, unfortunately, but it’s safe to surmise that they were murdered not all that long after the photos were taken.

A Nazi soldier hands a young Roma boy a cigarette in the 1940s, teasing him with a “grownup activity” knowing full well this boy won’t live until he’s old enough to smoke.

This photo depicts an anti-Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden in March of 1937. The writeup on the back quotes General Hugh Johnson as saying, “Adolf Hitler and his immediate staff of Nazipathics have become a sort of monster, threatening the peace of the world.”

A Nazi soldier, smirking, brings a little person out of her house for a photo op, treating her like a plaything or a circus spectacle while her family watches fearfully from the doorway. This was taken somewhere on the Eastern Front, likely in Ukraine, and like the Roma children also pictured here, she likely did not survive.

This postcard depicts Crown Prince William of Prussia as a Hussar, wearing the Totenkopf (“death head”) symbol that would later become an insignia of the Nazi SS.

(Back) In Germany and German-occupied areas, Jewish people were required to identify themselves on any letters they mailed, as well as other legal documents, by adding “Israel” (for men) or “Sara” (for women) as middle names. This was required so that Nazi officials could sensor Jewish mail, as you can see by the postal censor tape. This envelope contained a letter written in 1941 to someone in Florida. The sender, a Jewish man, wrote “Israel” after his first name on the return address.