The Holocaust

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The Holocaust
Lydia and Erin
By
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Introduction
In this PowerPoint we are going to look at how
the holocaust happened and what the final
solution was. Also at why it was the Jewish
people plus Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovahs
Witnesses, Mentally Handicapped people and
millions of Russians that were prisoners of war.
These were all victims of the dreadful
Holocaust.
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The Background anti-Semitism
Christian Europe had regarded the Jews as
Christ Killers for hundreds of years. Jews
had been driven out from almost every European
country at one time or another. The way that they
were treated in England in the 13 century is a
typical example. In 1275 all Jews were made to
wear a yellow badge also 269 of them were hanged
in the Tower of London in 1287. However the
Jews were the main people targeted because many
Germans were poor and unemployed and wanted
someone to blame. They turned on the Jews, as
many of them were rich and successful in
business.
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How were the Jews treated in Germany?
During the 1920s a new organised group of
people in Germany began preaching hatred towards
the Jews. This was Hitlers Nazi party. Hitler
was obsessed with the Jews, but not in a good
way. All of his writings and speechs showed a
mixture of racist hate and fear. Hitler saw the
Jews as threat to the supposedly called Aryan
race which consisted of having blonde hair and
blue eyes and mainly German. Hitler said there
were many inferior races such as Slavs and
Negroes, but the lowest of them all were the
Jews. Once Hitler became chancellor of
Germany in 1933, persecution of the Jews became
official policy. Placards reading Jews not
wanted appeared outside shops and cafés and
beside roads leading to towns and villages.
Stormtroopers beat Jews up in the streets. By mid
1930s over thirty five thousand Jews had fled
from Germany.
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The Ghettos
Firstly what were the Ghettos? Well, the
ghettos were what the Germans built to keep the
Jews separate from the German people. They were
houses in a small area surrounded by a high wall.
The houses were unheated, dirty, smelly and
extremely cramped as there were seven people per
room. They were only given 300cal of food a day.
This is the same amount as 1.8kg (only two and a
half loaves of bread!) and this was per person
per month. Anyone who left the ghetto was
executed. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw. There
was over half a million Jews in this particular
ghetto. Once Germany had invaded Poland
even more Jews were trapped under German rule.
The Germans moved Jews into a number of ghettos,
and slowly the Nazis achieved what they wanted.
The Jews, forced to live in sub-human conditions
became very weak and under-nourished, because of
this they began to look like the sub-humans that
the Nazi propaganda made them out to be.
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Between 1941 and 1943, underground resistance
movements developed in about 100 Jewish ghettos
in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. Their main goals
were to break out of the ghettos, and join
partisan units in the fight against the Germans.
The Jews knew that uprisings would not stop the
Germans and that only a handful of fighters would
succeed in escaping to join with partisans.
Still, Jews made the decision to resist. Further,
under the most adverse conditions, Jewish
prisoners succeeded in initiating resistance and
uprisings in some Nazi concentration camps, and
even in the killing centers of Treblinka,
Sobibor, and Auschwitz. Other camp uprisings took
place in camps such as Kruszyna (1942), Minsk
Mazowiecki (1943), and Janowska (1943). In
several dozen camps prisoners organized escapes
to join partisan units.
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Major Ghettos in Warsaw
Auschwitz death camp
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The Final Solution
On the 20th January 1942, the leading Nazis met
to plan what they called a Final Solution to
the Jewish problem. All this meant was the
complete extermination of all Jews under German
control. A destruction of a particular race is
called genocide. Death camps were built in
remote areas of eastern Europe. Everything down
to railway trucks were prepared and time tables
were drawn up and arrangements made for all Jews
to be rounded up. Jews were rounded up in
Germany, Eastern Europe, France and every other
part of Nazi controlled Europe. They were all
sent to death camps. Auschwitz was the worst of
these extermination camps and was located in
Poland. At least four million people were sent to
Auschwitz however only about 60,000 survived.
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Even children were victims of the terrible
Holocaust.
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Thank You, for listening!