Transcript The Holocaust

The Holocaust
Chapter 18, section 3
1933 - Hitler Comes to Power
• Hitler makes antiSemitism the official
policy of the Nazi State
• Constant attacks on the
“Jewish Image” from
mass media
• Jewish children were
expelled from school
• Jews were forced to sell
their business to
“Aryans” at extremely
low prices
Boycotts of Jewish owned business
• "Attention Germans. These Jews (five and dime)
stores are the parasites and gravediggers of German
craftsmen. They pay starvation wages to German
workers. The chief owner is the Jew, Nathan Schmidt.
• Forced to wear
badges identifying
them as being Jewish
– Opens people up to
attacks from Brown
shirts, Police, SS
1935 - Nuremburg Laws
• Defines “Jewishness”
– Non-practicing Jew + 3 or more Jewish Grandparents = Jew
– Practicing Jew + 2 or more Jewish Grandparents = Jew
• Strips Jews of German citizenship
Outlaws marriages between Jews
and Non-Jews
1938 – “Kristallnacht”
• “The Night of the
Broken Glass”
• Mass looting and
destruction of
Jewish business
and Synagogues
• Thousands of Jews were
arrested
• Convinced many Jews
that they could not
outlast the Nazis
– Hundreds of thousands of
German Jews began to
seek refuge outside of
Germany
1938 - Evian Conference
 32 countries convened to discuss opening their
borders to Jewish refugees. Only the Dominican
Republic did
• 400k Polish
Jews were
rounded up and
confined to a
small part of the
city of Warsaw.
• Disease and
Starvation ran
rampant.
• Most would later
be deported to
Death Camps
1939 - Warsaw
Ghetto
Operation Barbarossa: the Invasion of the USSR
• Nazis at first
encouraged native nonJewish or communist
Russians (which wasn’t
many people) to kill
their Jews on their own
blaming them for
Stalin’s evil practices.
• This led to early
slaughters of Jews.
• The killing was not
enough for Hitler.
1941 - “Einsatzgruppen”
 Mobile killing squads patrolled Nazi occupied
Russia killing Jews
 33,000 in two days at Babi Yar
Einsatzgruppen troops began having
mental breakdowns because of all the
killing.
This is some of the first evidence that
Nazi beliefs of super-humans
thoughtlessly disposing of sub-humans
is unrealistic.
A more efficient way of disposing the
Jews was needed.
1942 - Wannasee Conference
• Nazi leaders came together to discuss “the Jewish
Problem”
• The “Final Solution” – Death camps would be
constructed to exterminate all European Jews
– Also – Gypsies, the homeless, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
homosexuals, intellectuals, and dissidents
Different Camps
• Different Camps
• Labor Camps – workers
were slowly starved to
death while working for
the Nazi
• Death Camps
(Concentration Camps)
– People were sent to
death camps for the
extermination
• POW Camps – Russian
POWs were worked to
death in labor camps
Concentration Camps
 Most prisoners were
killed immediately on
arrival in gas
chambers
• The healthiest would be left alive to carry the bodies to
the crematoriums
– Most of these people did within of starvation or disease
within months of arrival
Jewish
Resistance
• A few
prisoners
escaped to
alert Jews in
concentration
camps of the
Nazi’s plan to
deport them to
Treblinka
• Warsaw
uprising –
Nazis lost
control of the
Warsaw
Ghetto for
nearly a month
United States
Role
• US knew
about the
ongoing
Holocaust as
early as 1942
• Press gave
little coverage
to the story
• Roosevelt
form the War
Refugee
Board in 1944
– Saves 200k
Jews
1944 – 1945 Liberation
 As Allied
troops
advanced
through
Germany, they
discovered the
Nazi atrocities
and liberated
camps
November 1945 - Nuremburg
Trials
The biggest result to come out of this
trial was that individuals were
responsible for their own actions –
governments could not take the
blame.
• This was the first ever
international court to
prosecute “crimes
against humanity”.
• All allies were
represented.
• The Soviet judge and
prosecutor was the
toughest on ex-Nazis.
• The American lawyer
was Robert Jackson.
• The constant statements
of “We were just
following orders” or “We
didn’t know” we not
accepted by the
international court.
• 12 Nazi leaders were
executed
Final Toll of the Holocaust
• 5 to 6 million Jews
• 1.8 – 1.9 million Christian Poles
• 200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti
(Gypsies)
• 200,000–300,000 people with
disabilities
• 80,000-200,000 Freemasons
• 100,000 Communists
• 10,000–25,000 homosexual men
• 2,500–5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses