Transcript The Holocaust

POSSIBLE TERMS
TO DESCRIBE THE UNTHINKABLE
 Holocaust –from the ancient Greek for a “burnt
offering,” used metaphorically by English writers since
Milton to describe hideous destruction by fire
 Shoah –Hebrew for “catastrophe”, the term preferred by
Israeli scholars
 Genocide –a term coined by the Polish-born expert on
international law, Rafael Lemkin, to describe the attempt
to murder an entire people, outlawed by international
treaty in 1948
 Most Germans today speak of “the mass murder of the
Jewish people during the Second World War”
The British military governor of Jerusalem,
Borton Pasha, on December 11, 1917
THE BALFOUR DECLARATION
(from a letter of November 2, 1917, by Foreign Secretary
Balfour to Lord Rothschild and the Zionist Federation)
“His Majesty's Government view with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to
facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which
may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights
and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other
country.”
This language was incorporated into the formal
League of Nations mandate for Palestine in 1922
Trilingual documents of “Palestine, E.I. [Eretz Israel]”
“Palestine:
Promised Land,
Land Regained:
The Most
Extraordinary Effort
of our Time”
(Zionist recruitment
film, 1935)
THERE WERE ABOUT TWO MILLION PEOPLE
ALTOGETHER IN INTERWAR PALESTINE
DATE
Jewish
Population
1921
69,000
1926
150,000
1931
172,000
1936
384,000
1939
425,000
Jewish immigration
accelerated to 60,000
per year after the Nazi
seizure of power in
1933
The Western Wall, beneath the Dome of the Rock
Orthodox rabbis provoked bloody riots in
August 1929 by placing a screen here
Amin el-Husseini, “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem,
and the Arab Committee in 1936
Scottish troops hunt Arab rebels, 1936/37;
thousands of Palestinian militants were killed.
THE PUBLIC RECORD OF THE
JEWISH REFUGEE CRISIS
300,000 of 500,000 German Jews flee persecution from
1933 until September 1939.
1937: Britain responds to Arab uprising in Palestine by
restricting Jewish immigration to 15,000 per year.
July 1938: At the Evian Conference delegates from 32
countries refuse to help Jewish refugees.
April-December 1940: The German occupiers confine 3
million Polish Jews to ghettoes.
1942: Berlin orders that all Jews under German rule be
“evacuated” to “labor camps” in Eastern Europe.
Burning Synagogues in
Siegen and Bielefeld
on Reichskristallnacht,
November 9/10, 1938
Jews arrested during Reichskristallnacht are
mustered in Buchenwald, November 1938. The SS now
took charge of pressuring all Jews to flee Germany.
Entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, where 500,000 Jews
were crammed into a district built for 50,000
Crowded street in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941/42:
Jobs were scarce and food rations, grossly inadequate
Administering
racial
discrimination:
A German food
ration card
from February
1940 and the
Yellow Star
The Secret History of the
“Final Solution of the Jewish Question”
Preparations for the invasion of the USSR call for the
“annihilation of the Jewish-Bolshevik system” and
execution of all “commissars”.
The top Nazi leaders agree in secret, probably in July
1941, that the policy of expulsion must be replaced by
mass murder.
Mass shootings of Jewish men, women, and children in
occupied Soviet territory begin in August/September
1941.
Genocide became the policy of the German government
at the secret Wannsee Conference in January 1942.
Soviet POW’s fill in the ravine where the SS shot 33,000
Jews from Kiev at Babi Yar on September 29/30, 1941
Site of the Wannsee Conference,
convened on January 20, 1942, by the
Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich and SS
Colonel Adolf Eichmann.
Bureaucrats learn that “it is the Führer’s
wish” that all Jews be “evacuated” and
that most are expected to perish….
German Jews deported from Würzburg, spring 1942
Nazi propaganda in 1942
blamed the Jews for the war
“The Jewish Conspiracy”
“THE JEW:
Warmonger
War-Prolonger”
Map of the operations associated with the Holocaust,
1942/43
Auschwitz-Birkenau, February 1945
Auschwitz when Elie Wiesel arrived
THE RAILWAY ENTRANCE TO AUSCHWITZ
Elie Wiesel in 1943
(at age 15),
the year before his
deportation to
Auschwitz.
His family in Sighet
came under Hungarian
rule in 1940.
Hungary had grown through alliance with Hitler.
Sighet was just northeast of Baia Mare
Admiral Miklos Horthy,
Regent of Hungary,
1919-1944:
He bowed to German
pressure to deport 100,000
“alien” Jews (such as
Moishe the Beadle) but
refused to deport the
800,000 Hungarian Jewish
citizens.
Germany occupied Hungary
in March 1944, and mass
deportations to Auschwitz
began in May.
Hungarian Jews newly arrived at Auschwitz, May-June 1944
Hungarian Jews undergo selection on
the Auschwitz train ramp
Hand-carved model of the main gas chamber and
crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau
(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Details
Geographic
distribution of
the six million
Jewish victims
Elie Wiesel, liberated in Buchenwald, 16 April 1945
Elie Wiesel on the Day of Remembrance in the U.S. Capitol
with President Carter & Senator Robert Byrd, 1978
WIESEL ATTENDED NETANYAHU’S SPEECH TO CONGRESS
ON MARCH 3 AS A GUEST OF JOHN BOEHNER
Netanyahu: "Elie, your life and
work inspires us to give meaning to
the words, 'never again.'
"And I wish I could
promise you, Elie, that
the lessons of history
have been learned. I
can only urge the
leaders of the world not
to repeat the mistakes
of the past. But I can
guarantee you this, the
days when the Jewish
people remained passive
in the face of genocidal
enemies, those days are
over."