Transcript concentration camps

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.
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.
Between 1939 and
1945 six million Jews
were murdered, along
with hundreds of
thousands of others,
such as Gypsies,
Jehovah’s Witnesses,
disabled and the
mentally ill.
Percentage of Jews killed in each country
Nazi Policies
• Early policies aimed to exclude
German Jews from all aspects of the
country’s political, social, &
economic life
• April 1, 1933 Nazi’s ordered a 1-day
boycott of Jewish businesses
• 1935- Nuremberg laws stripped Jews
of their German citizenship &
outlawed Jew/Non Jew marriage
• Nazi-controlled newspapers & radio
attacked Jews as enemies of Germany
• 1938- most Jews lost their jobs &
Jewish students were expelled from
school
• Jew was defined as any person who
had 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents,
regardless of their religion or anyone
with 2 Jewish grandparents &
practiced Judaism
–Identities were marked on cards with a
red “J”
–Eventually forced to wear yellow stars
on their clothes
Hitler’s Police
• Formed the Gestapo to identify &
pursue enemies of the Nazi regime
• Also formed the SS or Schutzstaffel,
an elite guard that developed into the
private army of the Nazis
• By 1939 the Gestapo became part of
the SS
• Duties included guarding the
concentration camps
–Place for “undesirables”Communists, homosexuals,
Jehovah’s Witness, Gypsies, & the
homeless
“Kristallnacht”
• Many hoped that they could outlast
Hitler, until he lost power
–They were proved wrong
• Nov. 9, 1939- Nazis began looking &
destroying Jewish stores, houses &
synagogues
• “Night of Broken Glass”
• Arrested thousands of Jews & sent
them off to concentration camps,
followed by a fine, making Jews pay
for the damage
Refugees Seek an Escape
• 1933-1937 about 130,000 Jews
(1 in 4) fled Germany
• Began seeking protection in US, Latin
America, & Palestine
• Few countries welcomed the refugees
(people were out of work due to the
Depression)
From Murder to Genocide
• Nazis planned to put Jews in ghettos,
surrounded by a fence, wall, or
“armed guards”
–Received little food, hunger,
overcrowding, & lack of sanitation,
brought on disease
The Einsatzgruppen
• Mobile killing squads that shot
Communist political leaders & Jews
in German occupied territory
–Rounded up their victims, drove
them to gullies or pits, & shot them
• Jan. 1942, Nazi officials met at the
Wannsee Conference to agree on a
new approach
–Developed the “final solution to the
Jewish question”
•genocide
A MAP OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEATH CAMPS
USED BY THE NAZIS.
16 of the 44 children taken
from a French children’s home.
They were sent to a
concentration camp and later to
Auschwitz.
A group of
children at a
concentration
camp in
Poland.
ONLY 1 SURVIVED
Part of a stockpile of
Zyklon-B poison gas
pellets found at
Majdanek death camp.
The Death Camps
Jan 1942 Nazi opened a specifically
designed gas chambers disguised as a
shower room at the Auschwitz camp
Most Jews were told they were being
transported to “the east” to work
• Those who looked too weak to work were
immediately killed
• Prisoners then carried the bodies to the
crematoria, where they were burned
• Life expectancy was a few months at
Auschwitz
• Men & women had their head shaved & a
registration number tattooed on their arms
• Given one set of clothes & slept in
crowded, unheated barracks on hard
wooden pallets
• Food was one cup of imitation coffee,
small piece of bread & thin, foul tasting
soup made with rotten veggies
• Diseases swept through the camps
• Others died from torture or cruel medical
experiments
• Before poison gas was used, Jews
were gassed in mobile gas vans.
Carbon monoxide gas from the
engine’s exhaust was fed into the
sealed rear compartment. Victims
were dead by the time they reached
the burial site.
Smoke rises as
the bodies are
burnt.
Jewish women, some holding infants, are forced to
wait in a line before their execution by Germans and
Ukrainian collaborators.
A German policeman shoots individual Jewish
women who remain alive in the ravine after the
mass execution.
Portrait of two-yearold 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.
Nazis sift through a huge pile of
clothes left by victims of the massacre.
Two year old Mani Halef’s clothes are
somewhere amongst these.
Fighting Back
Underground resistance groups
• Under
Violent uprisings
Aug. 1943 damaged the
Treblinka death camps so bad,
it had to close
Often came too late to save many
people & were quickly crushed
• Escape was the most common form
• Most failed & most who escaped were
later caught
Rescue & Liberation
• US government knew about the
Holocaust in Nov. 1942
• Received little attention
• Jan. 1944 FDR created the War
Refugee Board (WRB) to help people
threatened by the Nazis
–Helped save 200,000 lives
• Late 1944 Nazis abandoned the camps
outside Germany & moved the
prisoners to German soil
• 1945 US troops were able to witness
the horrors
• Allies placed a number of former
Nazis on trial
• Charged with crimes against peace,
humanity, & war
• Nuremberg Trials Nov. 1945
–12 of 24 defendants received death
sentences
–Individuals must be responsible for
their own actions
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.
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.
“Until September
14, 1939 my life
was typical of a
young Jewish
boy in that part
of the world in
that period of
time.
WHY?
I lived in a Jewish community surrounded by
gentiles. Aside from my immediate family, I had
many relatives and knew all the town people,
both Jews and gentiles. Almost two weeks after
the outbreak of the war and shortly after my Bar
Mitzvah, my world exploded.
In the course of the next five and a half years I lost
my entire family and almost everyone I ever
knew. Death, violence and brutality became a
daily occurrence in my life while I was still a
young teenager.”
Leonard Lerer, 1991