February 2, 1943:
- "As the month begins, 40,000 Jews are hiding in the forests of the Volhynia region of Poland.
Before the year is out, 37,000 will perish from hunger and execution. - "At Bialystok, Poland, eight SS men are killed by members of a Zionist youth movement resisting deportation.
Members are captured and deported to the Treblinka death camp, where they attack guards and are killed.
Their leader is Eliyahu Boraks. - "The slave-labor camp at Chrzanów, Poland, is dissolved, with 1,000 laborers sent to the death camp at Auschwitz.
- "The Nazis establish a Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- "A young Jewish woman at Treblinka, stripped naked by her captors, grabs a rifle from a Ukrainian guard and kills two Germans and wounds a third before being subdued.
She is subsequently tortured to death. - "German authorities direct Hungary to provide 10,000 Jews for copper-mine slave labor at Bor, Yugoslavia; See September 1943.
- February 1: "Nazis kill 1,500 Jews at Minsk, Belorussia, bringing the total number of Minsk victims since July 1941 to nearly 87,000.
- February 2: "In a major turning point of the war, the encircled German Sixth Army surrenders to Soviet forces at Stalingrad, Russia.
From this point on, most Europeans feel that the Germans will not win the war. - February 2: "The Kolomyia (Ukraine) Ghetto is liquidated; 2,000 Jews are killed."
"German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus (left), accompanied by two staff officers, walks toward Red Army headquarters to sign the formal surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Russia.
Paulus had begged Hitler to allow a retreat before it became too late, but the Führer refused to give up, leaving the exhausted and starving army surrounded by Soviet forces.
"Fortress Stalingrad," as Hitler called the troops, could not withstand the fierce winter and the lack of supplies and reinforcements.
Against orders and in the hopes of saving his remaining men, Paulus surrendered on February 3.
While he and his senior staff survived, most of his men did not."
"Within the walls of Auschwitz and other camps, humans replaced animals as subjects for experimentation.
Unscrupulous surgeries were performed on inmates, both healthy and ill, and subjects were exposed to a variety of chemicals and viruses.
Otherwise healthy prisoners were injected with typhus, tuberculosis, and malaria.
This photo shows the results of a substance coded B/F, seven days after injection into a prisoner's forearm."
"Jewish nurses and physicians struggled to care for the ill and injured within the ghettos.
Pictured here are patients and family members in the Kovno (Lithuania) Ghetto.
As trained medical personnel fell victim to disease and starvation, the ghetto's leadership sought to prepare new people to take their places.
Secret medical training was offered in Warsaw and, most likely, Kovno."