Transcript "Final Solution" (overview of the Holocaust)

TERMS TO DESCRIBE THE UNSPEAKABLE
(most Germans today speak awkwardly of
“the mass murder of the Jewish people”)
“Holocaust” is derived from the ancient Greek for
“wholly burnt,” i.e., an offering to the gods consumed
by fire on the altar. English-speakers since Milton have
used it to describe any great destruction by fire or
disastrous loss of life, and historians since around 1960,
to describe the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews.
“Shoah” =Hebrew for “calamity”, the term preferred by
Israeli scholars since 1945.
“Genocide” =the crime of attempting to murder an
entire people, coined by the Polish-born expert on
international law Raphael Lemkin in 1943 and enshrined
in the United Nations “Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” in 1948.
After
Reichskristallnacht
Hitler placed
Reinhard Heydrich
in charge of
pressuring Jews to
emigrate
Jews arrested during Reichskristallnacht are
mustered in Buchenwald, November 1938
GERMAN EXPANSION
60% of German
Jews emigrated
by 1939
But the Nazis’
“Jewish Problem”
revived with the
annexation of
Austria,
Bohemia, and
Poland….
Throughout German-occupied Europe,
Jews were segregated in 1940 and received lower rations
Das Großdeutsche Reich (1940-44): Non-aryans were swiftly
expelled from West Prussia, the Warthegau, & Alsace-Lorraine
The Lodz ghetto, established on April 30, 1940
One of the three Lodz Ghetto foot bridges across
the streetcar lines of Litzmannstadt
THE MADAGASCAR PLAN
Himmler recommended to Hitler on May 25, 1940, that
all “racially valuable” Polish children be removed to
Germany, while the rest should be denied any education
beyond learning to count to five hundred and write their
names. “As inhuman and tragic as each individual case
might be, this was nonetheless the mildest and best
method if one rejected on grounds of conscience
the Bolshevist method of the physical destruction
of a people as un-German and impossible.”
The memo later suggested “the possibility of a great
emigration of all Jews to Africa or elsewhere into a
colony.” Hitler endorsed the memo, and negotiations
began with Vichy France & the USA.
Germany’s defeat in the Battle of Britain (Sep-Nov 1940)
made the Madagascar Plan impossible.
Entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto, founded in October 1940,
where up to 500,000 Jews lived in a district built for 50,000
The best hope for
survival lay in proving
the value of Jewish
labor for the German
war economy
(a forced labor detail,
Warsaw Ghetto, 1941)
Nazi “Productionists” vs. “Attritionists” in Poland
Odilo Globocnik (1904-45),
Hans Frank (1900-46),
SS Police Commander in
Governor-General of Poland
the Generalgouvernment
Pedestrians ignore a corpse, Warsaw Ghetto, ca. 1942:
Frank gained permission in May 1941 to reorganize the Ghetto
but found the population too weak for meaningful labor….
PREPARATIONS FOR “OPERATION BARBAROSSA,”
December 1940-May 1941
In Poland the army refuses to “liquidate the Polish
intelligentsia,” so Hitler orders a major expansion of the
SS, including the formation of Waffen-SS combat units,
SS military police units, and roving SS execution squads
(Einsatzgruppen) to conduct anti-partisan warfare.
All German soldiers receive orders to ignore the Geneva
Convention, because the USSR had never signed it.
The “Commissar Order” of May 1941 requires the
execution of all Communist functionaries; oral instructions
specify that all Jews should be treated as commissars.
German troops receive orders to live off the land and to
plunder food supplies for shipment home, even if “tens of
millions” of Russians starve to death.
German
conquests,
JuneDecember
1941
“Grain that will benefit the victor”
(propaganda photo, summer 1941)
It was
German
policy that
no food
move from
the rural
south to
Russia’s
urban
north, nor
people
from north
to south
Soviet POWs fill in the ravine at Babi Yar outside Kiev
after SS Einsatzgruppen shot over 33,000 Jews
on September 29/30, 1941
Site of the Wannsee Conference,
convened on January 20, 1942,
by Reinhard Heydrich and
SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann
“The Jew:
Warmonger,
War-Prolonger”
(1942):
Jews were blamed
for the Allied
bombing campaign,
and the argument
that Jews would
face lynch mobs in
German cities
provided an excuse
to “evacuate” them.
In 1942 the ghettos became waiting rooms for the death camps
Flow chart for the
process of assemblyline murder
developed in 1942 at
the death camps:
Chelmno, 150,000
Treblinka, 800,000
Sobibor, 250,000
Belzec, 575,000
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
1,100,000
WHAT ALL GERMANS KNEW:
The Jews of Würzburg are “evacuated” in March/April 1942
Jewish deportees travelling through Germany, 1942/43
THE BEST KEPT SECRET:
Auschwitz entrance--“Arbeit macht frei” (”Work sets you free”)
Rail Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942
Auschwitz alone was both a death camp and industrial center
Hungarian Jews newly arrived at Auschwitz, spring 1944
A new shipment of Hungarian Jews undergoes
selection on the Auschwitz train ramp
The weaker were disposed of immediately:
Hand-carved model of the main gas chamber and
crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau
(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Details
Auschwitz-Birkenau labor camp, February 1945:
The stronger among the newly arrived were
sent to these barracks for “destruction through labor”
Jewish victims
of the Third
Reich:
“Righteous
Gentiles” were
found most
often in
Denmark and
France
ORIGINS OF THE “FINAL SOLUTION
OF THE JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE”
 Jan. 1939: Hitler tells the Reichstag, “If international financeJewry should succeed in dragging the nations once more into a
world war, the result will be NOT be the Bolshevization of the
earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of
the Jewish race in Europe!”
 Sep. 1939: Three million Polish Jews become subjects of the
German Reich and are ghettoized in 1940.
 Summer 1940: Himmler promotes the “Madagascar Plan.”
 May 1941: “Commissar Order” issued to Wehrmacht units
preparing to invade Russia; SS forms Einsatzgruppen.
 July 31, 1941: Hermann Göring orders Heydrich to take
charge of the “complete solution of the Jewish question.”
 Sep. 30, 1941: The 33,771 Jews of Kiev are shot at Babi Yar,
including women and children.
 January 20, 1942: The Wannsee Conference.