The Holocaust

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The Holocaust
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Anti -Semitism This is the term given to
political, social and economic agitation against
Jews. In simple terms it means Hatred of Jews.
Aryan Race This was the name of what Hitler
believed was the perfect race. These were people
with full German blood, blonde hair and blue eyes.
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For hundreds of years Christian Europe had
regarded the Jews as the Christ -killers. At one
time or another Jews had been driven out of
almost every European country. The way they were
treated in England in the thirteenth century is a
typical example.
In 1275 they were made to wear a yellow badge.
In 1287 269 Jews were hanged in the Tower of
London.
This deep prejudice against Jews was still strong
in the twentieth century, especially in Germany,
Poland and Eastern Europe, where the Jewish
population was very large.
After the First World War hundreds of Jews were
blamed for the defeat in the War. Prejudice
against the Jews grew during the economic
depression which followed. Many Germans were
poor and unemployed and wanted someone to blame.
They turned on the Jews, many of whom were rich
and successful in business.
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Nazis Begin Persecution

• Nuremberg Laws- Laws that denied German
  citizenship to Jews, banned marriages between
  Jews and non-Jews and segregated Jews at every
  level of society.
• Wanted the Final Solution to get rid of Jews.
• Propaganda produced intended to turn people
  against Jews.

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Pre-war German Propaganda
Anti-Jewish propaganda book "The Poisonous
Mushroom Germany, c. 1938.
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Nazi propaganda photo depicts friendship between
an "Aryan" and a black woman. The caption states
"The result! A loss of racial pride."
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Kristallnacht

• Night of the Broken Glass
• Attacks on Jews in Germany, Austria and the
  Sudetenland.
• Secret police and military units destroyed more
  than 1500 synagogues and 7500 Jewish owned
  businesses, killed more than 200 Jews and injured
  more than 600. Thousands were arrested.

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Jewish Refugees Face Obstacles

• Between 1933 and 1937 about 129,000 Jews fled
  Germany and Austria. (including Albert Einstein)
• Because of the worldwide depression in the 1930s
  many Jews were not welcome in other countries.
• Many were sent back to where they came from.

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Concentration Camps

• Place where a groups of people were confined.
• Usually not designed to kill but rather make the
  members useful in the Third Reich.
• Tattooed numbers on arms and dressed in striped
  uniforms.
• Different colors worn by different groups.
• ex. Pinkhomosexuals, Jews yellow, red
  political prisoners.

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• Many killed by unrestricted guards.
• Starvation and disease was a problem
• Medical experiments were also known to happen.
• Mentally ill, too old, too young, and crippled
  were usually immediately sent to death.

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A prisoner in a compression chamber loses
consciousness (and later dies) during an
experiment to determine altitudes at which
aircraft crews could survive without oxygen.
Dachau, Germany, 1942.
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A Romani (Gypsy) victim of Nazi medical
experiments to make seawater potable. Dachau
concentration camp, Germany, 1944.
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Percentage of Jews killed in each country
AUSTRIA 35
POLAND 91
USSR 36
NORWAY 45
BELGIUM 45
LUXEMBOURG 55
ESTONIA 44
ROMANIA 84
A Total of 6,000,000 Jews
HUNGARY 74
YUGOSLAVIA 81
BOHEMIA 60
LATVIA 84
NETHERLANDS 71
LITHUANIA 85
GERMANY 36
FRANCE 22
GREECE 87
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A MAP OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEATH CAMPS
USED BY THE NAZIS.
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Death Camps

• Part of Hitlers Final Solution
• Plan was to exterminate 11,000,000 Jews.
• Death camps are where individuals are taken to by
  exterminated (killed).
• Auschwitz Most well known
• Victims were gassed, shot to death, and bodies
  were burned or buried in mass graves.
• Included Jews, Catholics, prisoners of war,
  homosexuals, anyone opposing Hitler.

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16 of the 44 children taken from a French
childrens home. They were sent to a
concentration camp and later to Auschwitz. ONLY 1
SURVIVED
A group of children at a concentration camp in
Poland.
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Part of a stockpile of Zyklon-B poison gas
pellets found at Majdanek death camp.
Before poison gas was used , Jews were gassed in
mobile gas vans. Carbon monoxide gas from the
engines exhaust was fed into the sealed rear
compartment. Victims were dead by the time they
reached the burial site.
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Smoke rises as the bodies are burnt.
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Jewish women, some holding infants, are forced to
wait in a line before their execution by Germans
and Ukrainian collaborators.
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A German policeman shoots individual Jewish women
who remain alive in the ravine after the mass
execution.
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Portrait of two-year-old Mania Halef, a Jewish
child who was among the 33,771 persons shot by
the SS during the mass executions at Babi Yar,
September, 1941.
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Nazis sift through a huge pile of clothes left by
victims of the massacre. Two year old Mani
Halefs clothes are somewhere amongst these.
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Bales of hair shaven from women at Auschwitz,
used to make felt-yarn.
After liberation, an Allied soldier displays a
stash of gold wedding rings taken from victims at
Buchenwald.
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In 1943, when the number of murdered Jews
exceeded 1 million. Nazis ordered the bodies of
those buried to be dug up and burned to destroy
all traces.
Soviet POWs at forced labor in 1943 exhuming
bodies in the ravine at Babi Yar, where the Nazis
had murdered over 33,000 Jews in September of
1941.
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Early Response

• U.S. could have helped if we let more Jewish
  people come in to the country.
• Why didnt we help? Great Depression,
  Anti-Semitism, underestimation of Hitler.

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U.S. Government Takes Action

• War Refugee Board- 1944 FDR saved thousands of
  Jews.
• Stalin showed no concern about what Hitler was
  doing.
• Camps were not military targets. We concentrated
  on defeating Hitler, not helping victims.

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Allied Soldiers Liberate the Camps

• Soldiers were unprepared for what they saw at the
  camps.
• Many Americans did not realize the extent of the
  problem until after the camps were liberated.
• Many Jews found refuge or home in the U.S.
• President Truman immediately recognized the New
  Nation of Israel in 1948.

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Have Any Genocides Occurred Since the Holocaust?

• Holocaust refers specifically to the
  Jewish/Undesirables Genocide we have presented
  today
• Genocide - mass murder of a group of people

• 1988 Kurdish genocide in Turkey and Iraq
• 1990 Rwandan genocide in Africa
• 1991 1995 Bosnian genocide in Europe
• May we never let it happen again