Transcript Holocaust_2

The Holocaust
The Final Solution
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Concentration
Camps
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In these camps, millions of prisoners were killed through
mistreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were
executed as unfit for labor.
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The majority of these camps were located in occupied
Poland; Why: Millions of Jews lived in this area.
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In most camps, prisoners were forced to wear identifying
overalls with colored badges according to their
categorization: red triangles for Communists and other
political prisoners, green triangles for common criminals,
pink for homosexual men, purple for Jehovah’s
Witnesses, black for Gypsies and asocials, and yellow for
Jews.
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Concentration
Camps
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Prisoners were often
transported using rail
freight cars.
Due to the conditions in the
cars, many died before they
reached their destination.
The prisoners were
confined to the rail cars,
often for days or weeks,
without food or water. Many
died of dehydration in the
intense heat of summer or
froze to death in winter.
Concentration
Camps
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Prior to and during the early years of WWII, concentration
camps were used for forced labor to manufacture war
materials for the Germ. military.
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However, towards the end of the war, these camps were
used to conduct horrific medical experiments including:
freezing, malaria, mustard gas, sulfonamide, sea water,
sterilization, typhus, poison, and incendiary bombs.
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The camps were liberated by the Allies between 1943 and
1945, often too late to save the prisoners remaining. For
example, when the UK entered Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in 1945, 60,000 prisoners were found
alive, but 10,000 died within a week of liberation due to
typhus and malnutrition.
“The Angel of Death”
Heinrich Himmler
Experience of a Liberator
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Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people.
You could not see which was which … The living lay
with their heads against the corpses and around them
moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated,
aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of
life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at
the terrible sights around them … Babies had been
born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A
mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give
her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his
arms … He opened the bundle and found the baby had
been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most
horrible of my life.
BBC’s Richard Dimbleby.
Starving prisoners in Mauthausen camp, Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the U.S. 80th
Infantry Division on May 5, 1945.
Extermination
Camps
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Extermination camps were built after the Wannsee
Conference as part of the “Final Solution” for Jews.
They were built to conduct the systematic killing of
millions of people: Gas chambers (exhaust and
Zyklon B)
Victims’ bodies were usually cremated or buried in
mass graves.
The groups of people that the Nazis sought to
exterminate were primarily the Jews of Europe and
Gypsies (Roma).
The majority of prisoners brought to extermination
camps were not expected to survive more than 24
hours beyond arrival.
Extermination
Camps
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Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau): about 1,100,000
Up to 8,000 people were gassed every day by the spring of
1944.
Chełmno: about 152,000
Bełżec: about 434,500
Majdanek: 78,000
Sobibór: about 167,000
Treblinka: at least 700,000
Maly Trostenets: at least 65,000
This gives a total of over 2.5 million, of which over 80% were
Jews. These camps thus accounted for about half the total
number of Jews killed by the entire Nazi Holocaust, including
almost the whole Jewish population of Poland.
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Ruins of a gas camber.
Majdanek crematorium
Selection" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right
meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers.
Entrance to Auschwitz II: Extermination Camp
Entrance to Auschwitz II: Extermination Camp
The Cover-up and the
Death Marches
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By mid-1944, The Final Solution had mostly run
its course: The Jewish communities w/in reach
of the Nazis had been exterminated.
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However, with the advancing Allied fronts, the
Nazis began their cover-up:
The gas chambers were dismantled
The crematoria were dynamited
Mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated
Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on
the sites to give the impression that they had
never existed.
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The Cover-up and the
Death Marches
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The cover-up also included forced marches of surviving Jews
back to Germ:
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Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation,
prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to
train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or
shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march
again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged
behind or fell were shot. Around 100,000 Jews died during these
marches.
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The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in
January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine
days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched
60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35
miles) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps.
Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie Wiesel and his father,
Shlomo, were among the marchers.
Jewish Resistance
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During WWII, the Nazis tried to keep both the
killings and the death camps secret.
Why: Don’t want to decrease Germ. public
opinion of the Nazis; don’t want to increase the
resolve of the Allies.
The Nazis were so successful in their cover-up
that even the Euro. Jews were unaware of what
was going to happen to them.
However, once people began to find out
(liquidation of the ghettos), Jewish and nonJewish resistance groups began to form.
Jewish Resistance
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There are many examples of Jewish resistance to the
Holocaust, most notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of
January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish
fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks, and killed several
hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly
superior forces.
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The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was followed by the rising in
the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about
200 inmates succeeded in escaping from the camp after
overpowering the guards.
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Two weeks later, there was a rising in the Bialystok ghetto.
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In September, there was a short-lived rising in the Vilnius
ghetto.
Jewish Resistance
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In October, 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an
escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined
the Soviet partisans. Most of the participants in these risings were
killed, but some managed to escape and joined partisan units.
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On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz
staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives
from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly
destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass
escape, but all 250 were killed soon after.
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An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought
the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe. The Jewish
Brigade, a unit of 5,000 volunteers from the British Mandate of
Palestine fought in the British Army. German-speaking volunteers
from the Special Interrogation Group performed commando and
sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the
Western Desert Campaign.
Jewish Resistance
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For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the
passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and,
where possible, bribery of German officials.
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A major factor hindering Jewish resistance both inside and
outside of the ghettos was the widespread lack of support for
the Jews.
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Anti-Semitic Euros in occupied areas helped the Nazis hunt
down Jews, and pro-Nazi govs., such as those of Fr., Italy, and
Hungary, sent tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps.1
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Most people in occupied areas did nothing to help the Jews for
fear of punishment, however, there were small numbers of
people who would provide helps to Jews and other persecuted
people.
Notice posted in the Polish town of Częstochowa, warning of the death penalty for
hiding, feeding, or selling food to Jews and for Jews found outside the Jewish ghetto
without a permit. (Dated 24 September 1942).
Jewish Resistance
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In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor
camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong,
and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that
would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the
courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of
death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their
final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity
was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of
resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of
evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live
through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too
were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these
events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory.
Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit."
– Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy
Why Did the Allies Not
Do Anything Sooner?
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During the Holocaust, evidence and news of the
mistreatment of Jews and other groups of people
had reached the outside world, but little action was
taken to help them.
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Why: Allied govs. believed that fighting the war and
defeating the Nazis was the only way they could
help those suffering from Nazi injustices.
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It would only be until after WWII when the full
horrors of the Holocaust were known; justice would
be served through the Nuremburg Trials.
The Nuremburg Trials
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The Nuremberg Trials were a
series of trials most notable
for the prosecution of
prominent members of the
political, military and
economic leadership of Nazi
Germany.
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The trials were held in the city
of Nuremberg, Germany, from
1945 to 1949, at the
Nuremberg Palace of Justice.
The Nuremburg Trials
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The Trials were divided into 2 sections:
The first (Nov. 20, 1945 – Oct. 1, 1946): Trial of the Major War
Criminals which tried 24 of the most important captured leaders
of Nazi Germany.
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The second: Trial of Lesser War Criminals, included the
Doctors' Trial and the Judges' Trial.
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The 2 major reasons for holding the trials in Nuremburg were:
It was located in the Am./Fr. zone of occupation
The Palace of Justice was spacious and largely undamaged
(one of the few that had remained largely intact through
extensive Allied bombing of Germany). A large prison was also
part of the complex.
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The Nuremburg Trials
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The 24 major war criminals (including Göring
and Dönitz) were charged with a variety of
crimes including:
war crimes
political crimes
economic crimes
Sentences for those charged included: prison
sentences ranging from 10 years to life and
death by hanging (same in Doctors’ Trial).
Doctors’ Trial
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The Doctors’ Trial was part of the Lesser War Criminal Trials.
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20 of the 23 defendants were medical doctors and all were
accused of having been involved in Nazi human
experimentation.
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The accused faced four charges:
Conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity
as described in counts 2 and 3.
War crimes: performing medical experiments, without the
subjects' consent, on prisoners of war and civilians of occupied
countries, and participation in the mass murder of
concentration camp inmates.
Crimes against humanity: committing crimes described under
count 2 also on German nationals.
Membership in a criminal organization, the SS.
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The Legacy of the
Holocaust
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It remains the most brutal and horrific
occurrence of systematic genocide in history.
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The death toll of Nazi persecution ranges
from 9-11 million; 6 million of that range were
Jewish people.
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Hatred among human beings, including AntiSemitism, has not faded since the Holocaust.
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Liberation