Transcript Night Background PPT

What is the
Holocaust?
•The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six
million Jews by the Nazi regime during World War 2.
•In 1933, approximately nine million Jews lived in the
21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by
Germany during the war.
•By 1945, two out of every three European Jews had
been killed.
Piles of eyeglasses owned by Holocaust victims.
Why did the Holocaust
happen?
•The Holocaust occurred because Hitler and the Nazis
were racist. They believed the German people were a
'master race,' who were superior to others.
•The Nazis created a league table of 'races' with the
Aryans at the top and with Jews, Gypsies, and black
people at the bottom. These 'inferior' people were seen
as a threat to the purity of the German nation.
•When the Nazis came to power, they persecuted these
people, took away their human rights, and eventually
decided that they should be exterminated.
Circa 1935: two
Jewish pupils are
humiliated before
their classmates.
The inscription on
the blackboard
reads "The Jew is
our greatest
enemy, beware of
the Jew.”
Who were the Nazis?
•The Nazis were an ultra
conservative political
party headed by Adolf
Hitler.
•In 1933, they assumed
power of Germany.
•They created an
atmosphere of fear,
distrust, and suspicion.
What happened to the Jews?
•The Jews were forced to live in ghettos, or
small, locked-in communities within larger cities.
The conditions were unhealthy and very crowded.
•From there, Jews were deported by the
thousands to labor camps, concentration camps,
and death camps.
•Unless they were useful to the Nazis, they were
killed. This was part of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” or
the Nazi plan to destroy all the Jews of Europe.
European Concentration Camps
What is a death camp? How many?
Where?
•A death camp camp is a concentration camp with
special apparatus especially designed for mass
murder.
•Six such camps existed: Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and
Tremblinka. All were located in Poland.
A mass grave
of Jewish
bodies, lying
in a ditch in
the BergenBelsen
Concentration
Camp.
What was Auschwitz-Birkenau?
•Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing center where
the largest numbers of European Jews were killed.
•An estimated three million people were eventually
killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting,
and burning.
•After an experimental gassing there in September
1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass
murder became a daily routine.
•At Auschwitz, so-called camp doctors-physicians and surgeons--performed vile and
potentially lethal medical experiments on
concentration camp inmates, and tortured
Jewish children, Gypsy children, and many
others.
•“Patients” were put into pressure chambers,
tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death,
and exposed to various other traumas.
Children
subjected to
medical
experiments
in
Auschwitz.
Scenes of horror at Auschwitz, where body parts were kept and
used for experiments.