Transcript Woman waiting to be executed at Bergen Belson

In 1933, Nazi Propaganda
Minister Joseph Goebbels
urges a Berlin crowd to
boycott Jewish
businesses.
November, 10 1938.
Kristallnacht, or The Night of
Broken Glass, was a largescale coordinated attack on
Jews throughout the German
Riech.
By late 1941, the first Jews from
Germany and western Europe
were gathered and transported,
along with many other
minorities, to concentration
camps in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Lithuania,
Latvia, Ukraine, and western
Russia
At first the camps were
concentration or work camps.
Inmates were forced to endure
hard work, starvation,
unsanitary conditions, and
disease.
Some were taken in groups
to secluded areas where
they were stripped of
clothing, pushed into open
pits, machine-gunned, and
then quickly covered over, in
many cases before all were
dead.
Following the Wannsee Conference in
Berlin, January 20, 1942, the "Final
Solution" was an official policy of the Nazi
regime. More than half of the 6 million
Jews who were murdered were
systematically exterminated in the gas
chamber/crematorium system of the Nazi
Death Camps between 1942 and 1945.
When people arrived by train
they were told go to the left
which led to the gas chamber
and crematorium or to the right
to the labor camp. Families
were separated never to see
one another again.
Valuables were taken from the
camp inmates upon their arrival.
After extermination, even their
gold fillings were extracted and
melted down to be used in the
war effort.
Chelmno _________________Killed 320,000
Auschwitz- Birkenau _______ Killed 1,200,000
Belzek____________________Killed 600,000
Sobibor___________________Killed 250,000
Treblinka__________________Killed 700,000
Majdanek__________________Killed 1,380,000
Stutthof __________________Killed 65,000
More than 90 percent of the victims
sent to these extermination
camps were Jews
200,000 Romany (Gypsies),
homosexuals,
2-3 million Soviet POW’s, and
200,000 mentally or physically
handicapped people.
Auschwitz was the largest of the
Nazi concentration camps. It was
a place of forced labor and mass
murder.
Children at Auschwitz were also
subjected to horrible medical
experiments. Dr. Josef Mengele
often presided over these
experiments.
As Germany realized the end
was near, they tried to destroy
the evidence of their crimes
against humanity. They burned
and buried corpses and sent
thousands of prisoners on death
marches deep into German
territory so the allies wouldn’t
discover them.
In 1945, the concentration camp
Dachau was one of the first that
was liberated by allied troops.
After the war, many from the
concentration camps along with
others (prisoners of war,
refugees, stateless persons,
orphans, etc…) were put into
Displaced Persons Camps.
Unfortunately, many Nazi war
criminals, including Josef
Mengele, also made their way
to DP Camps.
“at least 10 top Nazis, including Adolf
Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Erich Priebke
and Josef Mengele ... A statement
issued by the ICRC, from its Geneva
headquarters, said they were among
thousands of people found in refugee
camps who were given Red Cross
travel documents.”
Some were later tracked down
and prosecuted for war crimes
but Mengele was never
apprehended.
The state of Israel was created
three years after the end of
WWII. Many displaced Jews
emigrated there.