The Holocaust
•
State-sponsored persecution
and annihilation of 11milion
people: including 6 million
Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Slavs,
the handicapped, the mentally
ill, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and
homosexuals
•
Hitler blamed Jews for WWI,
and the economic depression
after the war.
•
Anti-Semitism flared all over
Europe.
•
Propaganda used to demonize
Jews.
The Holocaust
Life Before the Holocaust
•
2nd:The Nuremberg Laws
1935
1st stage: Boycott of Jewish Businesses
1933
Hitler came to power in 1932.
•
2 months later, Hitler
announced a boycott of all
Jewish shops, goods, doctors,
and lawyers.
•
Mass Jewish firing
•
Jews banned from
Universities.
•
Books written by Jews and
others considered opponents
of the Reich were burned
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1933-1935, hundreds of anti-Jewish Laws Passed.
Jews forbidden to enter most public places.
Jews segregated
Signs were all over cities forbidding Jews from
entering parks, stores, hotels, and even entire streets
Stripped of citizenship
Anti Jewish violence soared
Jews must wear yellow Star of David at all times.
Jewish children expelled from schools
Jew are starting to be arrested and sent to
concentration camps as slave labor
1
Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass
Nov. 9, 1938
• Nazis led terror campaign on Jews
• Nazis claim a Jewish student killed an officer
• (In fact: Joseph Goebbels and other officers
carefully organized these pogroms)
• Nazis/Germans destroyed many Jewish
businesses, homes, schools, and synagogues.
• Over 100 Jews killed/30,000 arrested for the “crime”
of being Jewish.
• Nazis fined the Jewish community 400 mil. (the
Jewish community was blamed for causing the
trouble and ordered to clean it up!)
2
At 10 a.m. on April 1, 1933, members of the Sturmabteilung moved into place all
over Germany, positioning themselves outside Jewish-owned businesses to deter
customers. These stormtroopers are outside Israel's Department Store in Berlin.
The signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews." ("Deutsche!
Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!") The store was ransacked during Kristallnacht
in 1938, then handed over to a non-Jewish family.
Locating the Victims
Germany judenrein (cleansed of Jews)
• Between 1933 and 1941, the
Nazis aimed to make Germany
judenrein (cleansed of Jews) by
making life so difficult for them
that they would be forced to
leave the country.
• Forced emigration of Jews
• By 1938, about 150,000 German
Jews, one in four, had already
fled the country.
• After Germany annexed Austria
in March 1938, however, an
additional 185,000 Jews were
brought under Nazi rule.
• Many Jews were unable to find
countries willing to take them in.
•
•
•
•
•
•
In 1939, the German government conducted a census of all persons
living in Germany. Census takers recorded each person's age, sex,
residence, profession, religion, and marital status, and for the first
time, they also listed the person's race as traced through his or her
grandparents.
This information was later punched into coded cards by thousands
of clerks.
The cards were sorted and counted by the Hollerith machine, an
early version of the modern computer.
The Holleriths used by the Germans were developed by a German
branch of the American company later known as International
Business Machines (IBM).
The information from the 1939 census helped Nazi official Adolf
Eichmann to create the Jewish Registry, containing detailed
information on all Jews living in Germany.
The Registry also recorded the names of Jews in Austria and the
Sudetenland of western Czechoslovakia, which were occupied by
German troops in 1938 and 1939 and made part of the Reich
(German empire). Nazi racial ideology and policies did not stop at
Germany's borders.
.
WWII Begins: The Terror Starts:
3rd: Jewish Ghettos
1939
• Ghettos were small areas
within cities that were
sealed off by walls and
barbed wire.
• Nazis built Jewish Ghettos
in Eastern Europe
• Jews from all over Europe
sent there.
• Striped of land, and most
belongings
• Tens of thousands died of
starvation, disease, and
other issues.
• Became transition areas to
death/concentration camps.
3
A child dying in the streets of the crowded
Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and
disease killed 43,000 in 1941 alone
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
4th: The Final Solution: Answer to the Jewish
Problem
1940 Nazis plan to deport Jews
1941
to Madagascar.
Under cover of war and
confident of victory, the
Germans turned from the forced
emigration and imprisonment of
Jews to mass murder.
1st: Special mobile execution
squads, or Einsatzgruppen,
made up of Nazi (SS) units and
police, moved with speed on the
heels of the advancing German
army
Marked the beginning of the
“Final Soulution”
Moved through Eastern Europe
and Soviet Union and killed all
Jews
1.5 mil. Shot buried in
unmarked graves
2nd: systematic killings in
Death Camps
4
The Wannsee Conference:
• On January 20, 1942, fifteen highranking Nazi party and German
government leaders gathered for an
important meeting.
• They met in a wealthy section of Berlin
at a villa by a lake known as Wannsee.
• the purpose of discussing the "final
solution to the Jewish question in
Europe".
• The "final solution" was the Nazis' code
name for the deliberate, carefully
planned destruction, or genocide, of all
European Jews.
• The Nazis used the vague term "final
solution" to hide their policy of mass
murder from the rest of the world. In
fact, the men at Wannsee talked about
methods of killing, about liquidation,
about "extermination."
Facsimiles of the minutes
of the Wannsee
Conference, presented
under glass at the Wannsee
Conference House
Memorial. This page lists
the number of Jews in every
European country
• The Wannsee Conference, as it became known to
history, did not mark the beginning of the "Final
Solution."
• The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering
Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.
• Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where
the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi
leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be
transported from all over German-occupied Europe to
SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland.
• Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the
announced policy.
• Never before had a modern state committed itself to the
murder of an entire people.
Deportations Throughout Europe
1942
• Nazis had 6 major death
camps by 1942.
• Most Jews from Eastern
Europe killed
• Nazis deport Jewish
population from all
occupied territories.
France, Belgium..
A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man
sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukrainian SSR, in
1942. Present in the background are members of the
German Army the German Labor Service, and the Hitler
Youth. The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last
Jew in Vinnitsa".
Arrival at the camps:
• Sent by train to Polish
Death Camps.
Labor Camps:
• Nazis set up thousands
of camps.
• Tortured, worked to
death, starved,
murdered:
“Extermination through
work”
• Little to no food.
• Routinely beaten and
murdered
• Medical Experiments
• Camp conditions varied
• Isolated from towns/
barbed wire fences.
5
Brutality in the Camps
Extermination Camps
• Camps sole purpose was
Mass murder
• Trains or trucks full of
people come in, but leave
empty.
• belongings tagged, heads
shaved, sent into
showers/gas chamber.
• Millions gassed/ bodies
burned in ovens.
• Chelmno, Trehiinka,
Sobibor, Belzec,
Auschwitz-Birkenau, and
Majdanek-Lubin
Death Marches:
• Winter of 1944-1945
• Frantically moved
prisoners out of
camps near the front
• First by train, then by
foot
• No food, water, or
rest
• Those who could not
keep up were shot\
6
Auschwitz
“Work makes one free”: in actuality, labor became another form of
genocide
7
• 1944 Allied Forces pushing
Nazis back
• Hitler continued to exterminate
• Germans try to cover up the
killings
• Soviets first to liberate camps in
the East.: July 23, 1944:
Majdanek camp in Poland.
Jan. 27, 1945: Aushcwitz
(Germans forced to leave
prisoners to make hasty retreat:
left 348,820 men’s suits, 836,
255 women’s coats…)
• Allied soldiers come upon
thousands of dead bodies
“stacked up like cordwood”
• Free camp survivors/ try to
save as many as possible.: half
of the prisoners discovered
alive at Auschwitz died within a
few days of being freed
Liberation
1945
8
• Lived with Guilt for surviving,
when so many had died
• Jewish communities no
longer existed
• Homes taken
• Anti-Jewish riots broke out.
• Ended up in Displaced
Persons’ (DP) camps &
waited to be admitted to
other places: U.S., South
Africa, or Palestine
• U.N. voted to divide
Palestine into a Jewish and
Arab state: British began to
withdrawal from Palestine
• May 1948: State of Israel
was announced
Life after the war:
the Survivors
The Holocaust
Death Toll
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Jews: 6,000,000 (3.5 Mil Poles)
Non-Jewish Poles: 2,000,000
Gypsies: 800,000
Communists: 100,000
Homosexual Men: 25,000
Jehovah's Witnesses: 2,000
Total: 10-15 Million
9