Northeast Region of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Nazi propagandists built the myth of the perfect mother to convince "valuable" women to have babies. They peddled nationalism and conspiracy theories about "dangerous Jews," which were designed specifically to appeal to women. Learn how some women today have become messengers and targets for old conspiracies that divide us.

Join our nation and a global community to honor Holocaust survivors, remember the six million Jews murdered, and pay tribute to American soldiers who liberated victims. Tune in for this moving commemoration featuring remarks from US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, escaped the Nazis but lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust. He coined the word "genocide" and devoted the last 15 years of his life to lobbying governments to recognize it as an international crime.

While growing up in a time of racial segregation and the Great Depression, some young Americans looked beyond the struggles of their own nation to respond to the Nazi threat in Europe.

Josephine Baker, an American vaudeville performer turned glittering star of Paris, was at the peak of her fame in 1939 when the Nazi regime began its stranglehold on Europe. But then came an offer that changed her life. Like Baker, Virginia Hall, an American who lost a leg in a hunting accident, and Noor Inayat Khan, a Muslim pacifist, weren’t prototypical spies. Learn how they turned prejudice and society’s low expectations of women into weapons that hid their critical work to defeat the Nazis.

Hannah Szenes, a young poet, immigrated from Hungary to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1939 at age 18. She was part of a group of young Jews who joined the British Army and parachuted into German-occupied Europe. Their mission was to organize resistance to the Nazis and aid in the rescue of Allied personnel. Hannah parachuted into Yugoslavia in March 1944 and crossed into Hungary, where she was captured with a radio transmitter. She was held for nearly five months and ...tortured but refused to give up the code for the radio transmitter. Hannah was executed at age 23. Hannah wrote her last poem days before her arrest and gave it to another parachutist. Her poems are now widely published. #InternationalWomensDay Photo: Beit Hannah Senesh https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/con//gallery/hannah-szenes