Introduction to the HOLOCAUST

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Introduction to the HOLOCAUST
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What is the Holocaust?

• Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power in Germany
  in 1933 and lost power in 1945 -- only 12 years.
• By the end of the Hitler regime, the world had
  been plunged into a global world war, Europe was
  in shambles and nearly 30 million died.
• Among the dead were over 6 million Jews -- men,
  women and children --who were systematically and
  efficiently slaughtered for no other reason than
  that they were Jews.
• Additionally, an estimated 5.5 million non-Jews
  were systematically murdered.

This immense loss of life became know as THE
HOLOCAUST
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Time Line
1918 - 1933
1938 - 1941
Rise of the Nazis Party following WWI
1941 - 1942
Jews were confined to Ghettos as per Hilters
plan.
1942 - 1944
Concentration camps were the final step in
Hitlers plan.
1944 - 1945
People resisted by any means possible.
Throughout the Holocaust, victims received help
from rescuers.
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Vocabulary

• Anti-Semitism Opposition to and discrimination
  against Jews.
• Treaty of Versailles Germany and the Allies
  signed a peace treaty at the end of World War I.
• Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws were announced
  by Hitler at the Nuremberg Party conference,
  defining 'Jew' and systematizing and regulating
  discrimination and persecution.

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Nazi party holds mass meeting in Buckeberg in
1934. Other Nazi officials walk behind Hitler.
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Time Line
1918 - 1933
1938 - 1941
Rise of the Nazis Party following WWI
1941 - 1942
Jews were confined to Ghettos as per Hilters
plan.
1942 - 1944
Concentration camps were the final step in
Hitlers plan.
1944 - 1945
People resisted by any means possible.
Throughout the Holocaust, victims received help
from rescuers.
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Vocabulary

• Ghettos usually established in the poor
  sections of a city, where most of the Jews from
  the city and surrounding areas were subsequently
  forced to reside. Often surrounded by barbed wire
  or walls.
• Warsaw ghetto Established in November 1940, it
  was surrounded by wall and contained nearly
  500,000 Jews. About 45,000 Jews died there in
  1941 alone, as a result of overcrowding, hard
  labor, lack of sanitation, insufficient food,
  starvation, and disease.

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Warsaw ghetto boundary wall on Elektoralna
Street.
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Time Line
1918 - 1933
1938 - 1941
Rise of the Nazis Party following WWI
1941 - 1942
Jews were confined to Ghettos as per Hilters
plan.
1942 - 1944
Death camps were the final step in Hitlers
plan.
1944 - 1945
People resisted by any means possible.
Throughout the Holocaust, victims received help
from rescuers.
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Vocabulary

• Concentration Camp Concentration camps were
  prisons used without regard to accepted norms of
  arrest and detention.
• Death Camp Nazi extermination centers where Jews
  and other victims were brought to be killed as
  part of Hitler's Final Solution
• Labor Camp Those who did not go to their
  immediate death, went to "slow death" - the slave
  labor camps. Usually it was a quarry. But
  sometimes it was working for the German war
  effort.
• Genocide The deliberate and systematic
  destruction of a racial, political, cultural, or
  religious group

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Vocabulary

• Gas chamber A sealed room in which numerous
  victims could be killed all at once by inhaling
  poison gas.  Although Auschwitz used Zyklon B
  gas, most camps used carbon monoxide.
• Crematorium The ovens and furnaces where dead
  bodies of prisoners were consumed.

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The woman with the infant is joining those being
sent to the gas chamber.

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Time Line
1918 - 1933
1938 - 1941
Rise of the Nazis Party following WWI
1941 - 1942
Jews were confined to Ghettos as per Hilters
plan.
1942 - 1944
Concentration camps were the final step in
Hitlers plan.
1944 - 1945
People resisted by any means possible.
Throughout the Holocaust, victims received help
from rescuers.
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Vocabulary

• Allies During World War II, the group of nations
  including the United States, Britain, the Soviet
  Union, and the Free French, who joined in the war
  against Germany and other Axis countries.
• Axis Germany, Japan, Italy
• Gestapo Secret State Police. Prior to the
  outbreak of war, the Gestapo used brutal methods
  to investigate and suppress resistance to Nazi
  rule within Germany.

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An SS soldier stands among ruins in the Warsaw
ghetto during the suppression of the uprising.
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Time Line
1918 - 1933
1938 - 1941
Rise of the Nazis Party following WWI
1941 - 1942
Jews were confined to Ghettos as per Hilters
plan.
1942 - 1944
Concentration camps were the final step in
Hitlers plan.
1944 - 1945
People resisted by any means possible.
Throughout the Holocaust, victims received help
from rescuers.
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Vocabulary

• Righteous Gentiles Non-Jewish people who, during
  the Holocaust, risked their lives to save Jewish
  people from Nazi persecution
• Underground Organized group acting in secrecy to
  oppose government, or, during war, to resist
  occupying enemy forces.

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Inmates waving a home-made American flag greet
U.S. Seventh Army troops upon their arrival at a
concentration camp.
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Images

• Many of the images we will be viewing during our
  Holocaust unit may be disturbing or graphic. I
  expect all of you to act with maturity and
  respect the lives lost during the Holocaust.

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Starving inmate of Camp Gusen, Austria
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These are slave laborers in the Buchenwald
concentration camp near Jena many had died from
malnutrition when U.S. troops of the 80th
Division entered the camp.
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A German girl is overcome as she walks past the
exhumed bodies of some of the 800 slave workers
murdered by SS guards near Namering, Germany, and
laid here so that townspeople may view the work
of their Nazi leaders.
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Crematoria
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Children at Auschwitz.
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Entrance to Auschwitz in 1941. The slogan Arbeit
macht frei over the gate translates as "Work
(shall) make (you) free" (or "work liberates").
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An American GI and a French resistance member
inspect an oven in a crematorium in one of the
first concentration camps liberated in Germany in
December 1944.
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Kate BernathDescribes psychology of survival in
Auschwitz
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• We were, uh, in the midst of all our troubles we
  were trying to cheer each other up. If one was
  feeling very low, we, we tried to tell them, we,
  we dreamed about things what we were going to do
  when we got liberated. We were all...we never
  thought for a minute, I never thought for a
  minute that I'm really going to die. I, it just
  did not sink in. I mean with all these horrors
  around me I, I always thought that we were
  dreaming of, of things--when I get home I'm going
  to do this and I'm going to do that and I just
  want to see this, this war end and just live for
  the day when we see the Germans defeated. And
  that kept us alive. Never to lose hope. If you
  lost hope, that was the end of it. It was so easy
  in Auschwitz. All you had to do is reach out for
  the barbed wires. They were electrified. We would
  not do them the favor. We said if they want to
  kill us, they'll have to kill us.
  We are not going to die.

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