Transcript The Holocaust

The Holocaust
Progression of Holocaust
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Boycott of Jewish Businesses
Nuremberg Laws
Kristallnacht
Jewish Ghettos
Concentration Camps
Death Camps
Boycott of Jewish Businesses
• Included ALL Jewish, shops, goods,
doctors, and lawyers
• Purpose: Isolate Jews both socially &
economically from German society.
• Offered: official channel for the outpouring
of hatred and jealousy that had swept the
Nazis into power
– 10,000 fired from Jobs
– Businesses marked with Stars and attacked.
"Germans, defend yourselves, buy only at German shops!"
Nuremberg Laws
• Restricted freedom of Jews
– -Stripped Jews of their civil rights and
property
– Violence increased against Jews
– Part of the goal was to get Jews to
leave.
– Designed to separate Aryans from nonAryans and define the rights of a citizen
– Gave Jews inferior status in German
Society
Reich of Citizenship Law
1. Forbade mixed marriages
2. Can’t fly 3rd Reich Flag
3. All Jews had to register with the
government
4. Jews had to wear a yellow star of David.
Kristallnacht
November 9-10, 1938
• Night of Shattered Glass
• National Campaign of Terror
• Why: supposedly retaliation for the
assassination of a German official by a
Jewish Student
• 1,000s of SS soldiers and non-Jewish
German sympathizers went on a
rampage.
Devastation
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101 synagogues destroyed by fire.
76 demolished
7,500 shops destroyed
100 killed
30,000 arrested
Enacted a fine of $400,000,000 on the
Jewish community
Why don’t they leave?
• Jews were now
impoverished
• Many countries feared
massive wave of Jewish
refugees and closed their
borders to ALL Jews.
Saint Louis
• May 1939
• Ship was loaded with 900 Jews on their way to
Cuba
• When arrived in Cuba government had changed
mind about letting them in
• Went to US and begged for entrance off the
coast of Miami
• WE turned them away
• Returned to Germany and many were sent to
concentration camps
• Belgium, Holland, England, and France tried to
take some.
Jewish Ghettos
• Segregated the Jewish population in
Europe from Non-Jewish population.
• Small areas within a city that were sealed
off with barbed wire or walls.
• Temporary way to concentrate the Jews
until they could achieve goal of eliminating
or killing them all.
• 1939-All over northern & eastern Europe
• Warsaw Ghetto in Poland
– 500,000 Jews (45,000 died)
Genocide
• Deliberate killing of an entire people
• Called the final solution to the Jewish
question
• Goal was the disappearance of Jewry from
Europe
Concentration Camps
• Set up at beginning to control and terrorize
population of Europe
• Prisoners were starved, tortured, worked
to death and most cases murdered.
• Death was a by-product of forced labor
• Prisoner's living quarters consisted of
crowded wooden barracks with beds made
of wood boards.
• Monitored 24 hours a day.
Unimaginable terrors
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Families broken up
Torture
Chronic hunger
Disease
Unsanitary living conditions
Physical exhaustion
Demoralized prisoners
An Aerial Photograph of Auschwitz
Death Camps
• End of 1942
• 6 Major Camps-Auschwitz-Birkenau , Treblinka ,
Belzec , Sobibór, Lublin (also called Majdanek
• All in Poland
• Purpose was extermination
• Better, faster and less personal way of killing the
Jews.
• Gas Chambers: Large chambers in which
people were executed by poison gas.
Who was involved?
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Victims
Perpetrators
Bystanders
Resisters
Rescuers
Liberators
Victims
• Approximately 11 million people were killed because of
Nazi genocidal policy.
• It was the explicit aim of Hitler's regime to create a
European world both dominated and populated by the
"Aryan" race.
• The Nazi machinery was dedicated to eradicating
millions of people it deemed undesirable.
• Some people were undesirable by Nazi standards
because of who they were,their genetic or cultural
origins, or health conditions.
– Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs, and people with physical
or mental disabilities.
– Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the dissenting clergy,
Communists, Socialists,
• Those believed by Hitler and the Nazis to be enemies of
the state were banished to camps.
Perpetrators
• The National Socialist German Workers' Party or NSDAP , known
as the Nazi Party, controlled Germany from 1933 to 45.
• Nazis labeled and isolated Jews,
– Gypsies
– Slavs
– homosexuals
– political prisoners
– the mentally and physically disabled
• Millions were murdered in attacks by the Gestapo , the
SA , and the SS , in mass killings of the
Einsatzgruppen, in and around Nazi concentration, and
later death camps.
• Although Adolf Hitler is often perceived as the chief
perpetrator, there were others.
• believed in an ideology of racial cleansing.
• They profited financially
Bystanders
• were ordinary people who played it safe.
• As private citizens, they complied with the laws
and tried to avoid the terrorizing activities of the
Nazi regime.
• They wanted to get on with their daily lives.
• During the war, the collective world's response
toward the murder of millions of people was
minimal.
• Bystanders may have remained unaware, or
perhaps were aware of victimization going on
around them, but, being fearful of the
consequences, chose not to take risk to help
Nazi victims.
First they came for the communists, and I did
not speak out
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the socialists, and I did
not speak out
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the labor leaders, and I
did not speak out
because I was not a labor leader.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not
speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no
one
left to speak out for me.
Resisters
• As fear and terror became everyday
truths for many Europeans during the
Holocaust, standards of daily reality
shifted dramatically. The very act of
survival became an act of defiance.
• Resistance against the Third Reich
took many forms.
Rescuers
• Rescuers are those who, at great personal risk,
actively helped members of persecuted groups,
primarily Jews, during the Holocaust in defiance
of Third Reich policy.
• They were ordinary people who became
extraordinary people because they acted in
accordance with their own belief systems while
living in an immoral society.
• Thousands survived the Holocaust because of
the daring of these rescuers. Although in total
their number is statistically small, rescuers were
all colossal people.
Liberators
• Allied troops liberated prisoners of concentration camps.
• Although these soldiers had witnessed all the horrors of
war, the condition of the prisoners in the camps was
even more shocking. It was beyond any war scene the
soldiers had experienced.
• There were rows upon rows of bodies stacked up like
cordwood.
• Upon encountering the Ohrdruf concentration camp,
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Supreme
Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, was
overwhelmed with emotion.
• Liberators struggled to make sense of the scenes they
witnessed. Allied troops, physicians, and relief workers
tried to provide nourishment and medicine for the
prisoners, but many were too weak and could not be
saved.