Transcript Holocaustx

Hitler’s War Against the Jews of
Europe
Overview
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Heritage of Hate
Early Persecutions
Rounding them up
Final Solution
The Camps
Liberation and Coping
Finding a Scapegoat
• Nazism had to find a
reason for the trouble
Germany faced
following WWI.
• The answer was to claim
Jews gypsies and
foreigners had conspired
against the Germans.
• Most of the gypsy boys
in this photo were shot
by the Nazis.
Why the Jew?
• The Jewish people were the
primary target of the Nazi
hate machine.
• They were said to represent
almost 60% of German bank
owners even though they
were only about 1% of the
population.
• With the Great Depression
fresh on the people’s minds,
it was easy to blame the
Jew.
Fostering Hate
• The Nazis produced a film to
explain the supposed
inferiority of the Jewish people
and their “culpability” for
Germany’s troubles.
• The film even compared the
Jew to rats… remember that
rats carried the plague in
Medieval times and are
loathsome to most Europeans.
Fostering Hate
• In the film, the Jews were
blamed for everything…
• 82% of international crime
organizations
• 98% of prostitution
• “The common language of
international thieves comes
not without reason from
Hebrew and Yiddish.”
Hitler Speaks out against the Jewish
people…
A Call for Action
• After preaching for
years about the racial
superiority of the
German people and
blaming the Jews for
every conceivable
problem, Hitler finally
called for their removal
from German society.
Overview
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Heritage of Hate
Early Persecutions
Rounding them up
Final Solution
The Camps
Liberation and Coping
Technically, the
Jewish people are a
religious group, not a
race. Hitler did not
agree.
Promoting Anti-Semitism
• Early in Hitler’s reign in
Germany, he recognized
Der Stürmer as a state
newspaper.
• This weekly publication
was mainly anti-Semitic
propaganda and promoted
hatred against the Jews.
• The motto of the paper was
"The Jews are our
misfortune."
Required Jews to Register Property
Dismissed Jewish Civil Service Workers
Banned Jewish Doctors from treating non-Jews
All Jews given identity cards
• Marked with
red letter J
• Gave females
middle name of
Sarah and
males were
given the
middle name of
Israel
Defining the Jew
• Hitler defined a non-Aryan as
“anyone descended from nonAryan, especially Jewish, parents
or grandparents. One parent or
grandparent classifies the
descendant as non-Aryan ...
especially if one parent or
grandparent was of the Jewish
faith.”
• Later, Jews were forced to wear
the star of David on their clothes.
Measuring for the “Jew Factor”
• The Nazis argued that the
Jewish people were distinctly
different and identifiable.
• They used pseudo scientific
methods of “measurement” to
“prove” the “Jewishness” of
their victims.
• They sought fool proof ways
of identifying Jews medically
and of demonstrating the
superiority of the Aryan
Race.
Supposedly, one way to
find a Jew was to
measure for a large nose.
Assault on Ideas
• To control the thinking of the
German people, Hitler promoted
the “purification” of the German
culture.
• On May 10, 1933, hundreds of
Nazi students stormed the
libraries and book stores in cities
all over Germany and carried
thousands of books to bonfires –
more than 20,000 books were
burned in Berlin alone.
• Anything deemed to be “unGerman” was torched.
The Last Word…
A hundred years earlier, German author Heinrich
Heine had already written the last word on the
book burnings:
“Where one burns books,
one will in the end,
burn people.”
Heinrich Heine
Habitual and Dangerous Criminals
• In October, 1933 the Nazis
passed a law against
"Habitual and Dangerous
Criminals" that justified
placing the homeless,
beggars, unemployed, and
alcoholics in concentration
camps.
• The law also banned
Jewish people from serving
as newspaper editors
The First Camps
• Dachau and Buchenwald
were the first concentration
camps. They were
originally created to house
political prisoners and other
“undesirables.”
• Prisoners were Jews,
gypsies, mental patients and
just about anyone that
offended Hitler or posed a
political threat.
The broken glass gave the
November 1938 night it’s
name – Crystal Night, or
“The Night of Broken
Glass.” 191 Jewish
Synagogues were burned
out, 7500 shops were
looted, thousands of Jews
were arrested and 91 were
killed in retaliation for one
Jewish teen’s alleged
assassination of a German
foreign minister.
Kristallnacht
Synagogue
in Berlin
The Fasanenstrasse
synagogue in Berlin before and after the
Kristallnacht attacks…
Kristallnacht
• The Reichstag then passed a
law requiring the JEWS to pay
for the rebuilding and all other
damages. The bill was for a
billion of marks.
• In December 1938, Jewish
children were expelled from
school and Herman Goering
was placed in charge of
resolving “The Jewish
Question.”
Overview
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Heritage of Hate
Early Persecutions
Rounding them up
Final Solution
The Camps
Liberation and Coping
“I predict, in the event of
war, the necessity of the
extermination of the Jewish
race in Europe.”
Adoph Hitler - 1939
As the persecution of
Jews in Germany
accelerated, the Nazis
actually promoted the
concept of immigration.
A ship named the St.
Louis took hundreds on
a one way trip to Cuba,
but the Cubans turned
the ship away. It sailed
to Miami, but was once
again rejected. The ship
returned to Germany,
where in the coming
years, many of the
passengers died in
Hitler’s camps.
Immigration Efforts
Euthanasia
• At this hospital, the Nazis
practiced euthanasia on those
deemed to be of no use to the
state. Most were mentally ill or
severely physically
handicapped.
• Euthanasia of those who were
not “noble Aryans” made the
killing of Jews all the more
acceptable to the German
leadership. It also tested
methods that were to be used.
Isolation of the Ghettos
Warsaw - 1940
• After the start of the war, the
Nazis isolated the Jews in all
major occupied cities.
• These areas, called Ghettos,
already existed. The most
famous by far were the
Ghettos of Warsaw and
Krakow in Poland.
• Although not that bad at first,
they got worse as the war
lingered. They became
crowded and disease riddled
with little food available.
A German officer inspects a Jewish
man’s identity papers in Krakow-1941.
The Ghettos
The Ghettos
These sectors of the city
were reserved for Jews and
although they could come
and go at first, they were
eventually closed off and
turned into huge prisons.
The ghettos were a temporary
solution. They were little more
than places where Jews could
be held until it was determined
what would be done with them.
Hitler still had not settled on
just how to exterminate them.
The Einsatzgruppen
In areas where the Ghettos
were too remote or
inconvenient, the solution
lay in special SS battalions
called the Einsatzgruppen –
death squads whose job was
to shoot as many Jews as
they could without regard
for age or gender.
The Einsatzgruppen
• The mass shootings of
Jews began in full steam in
June 1941.
• In Poland, Hitler ordered
that all Jews who were not
of use to the Reich should
be eliminated.
• In one killing field near
Vilna Poland, 100,000
Polish Jews died by
gunfire.
The Einsatzgruppen
• Nearly a million Jews were shot by
the death squads, although few
precise records still exist.
• Among them was Mania Halef a
girl who was two in this photo, 7
on the day she was shot and killed.
• The Nazis did make some
accommodation for youth. If the
child was small, they had an adult
hold it in their arms and shot the
adult through the child – saved on
ammunition.
Einsatzgruppen
Jews were forced to strip and
were marched to huge open air
pits. They stood on the edge
and were shot so that the force
of the bullets striking their
body drove them into the pit.
Nazis then covered the dead,
turning the pit into a mass
grave. The Nazis then sent their
possessions, even clothing back
to Germany to be used by
Germans.
shootings
The execution of the
Kievian Jews…
shootings
The Einsatzgruppen often
forced victims to dig their
own pit before executing
them. Shootings continued
into 1944.
Members of the squads
were mostly volunteers,
but a few Nazi soldiers
who refused to murder
Jews were themselves
executed for refusing to
obey their orders.
Overview
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Heritage of Hate
Early Persecutions
Rounding them up
Final Solution
The Camps
Liberation and Coping
“When all the Jews were
inside the door was
bolted. ... The exhaust
fumes now poured into
the inside of the truck so
that the people inside
were suffocated…”
SS-man Theodor
Malzmüller, 1965 *
Wannsee Conference
Women, children,
the old & the sick
were to be sent for
‘special treatment.’
The young and fit would go
through a process called
‘destruction through work.’
On arrival the Jews
would go through a
process called
‘selection.’
How was the Final
Solution going to be
organized?
The remaining
Jews were to
be shipped to
‘resettlement
areas’ in the
East.
Conditions in the Ghettos were
designed to be so bad that
many died while the rest would
be willing to leave these areas
in the hope of better conditions
Shooting was too
inefficient as the
bullets were needed
for the war effort
Jews were to be
rounded up and
put into transit
camps called
Ghettoes
The Jews living in
these Ghettos were
used as a cheap
source of labor.
The Directive
In 1941, Hitler announced
that the Jews of Europe
would be gassed in special
camps built for the sole
purpose of their
extermination. Older
camps were converted to
death camps, and new ones
were built.
Special trucks were built
and tested. The exhaust
was redirected into the
back of the truck. The
victims were tied up in the
back of the vehicle and
suffocated in the carbon
monoxide generated by the
engine. The process was
slow and unreliable at
best. Something else was
needed. The answer lay in
an insecticide that had
been used for years.
Carbon Monoxide
Nazi issued prison uniform
commonly worn by people
in prison camps.
The Germans had
experimented for many
months with carbon
monoxide and other gases.
They eventually discovered
a chemical called Zyklon-B
that worked better than any
other they had. Essentially,
it is a crystal that gives off
poison gas when it contacts
air. Often used as an
insecticide in Germany, it
has been described as “bug
spray for humans.”
Zyklon – B
Overview
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Heritage of Hate
Early Persecutions
Rounding them up
Final Solution
The Camps
Liberation and Coping
A MAP OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEATH CAMPS
USED BY THE NAZIS
Between 1939 and 1945
six
million Jews were
murdered, along with hundreds
of thousands of others, such as
Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
disabled and the mentally ill.
Auschwitz Opens
Auschwitz opened in
1940 as a
concentration and
labor camp. The
sign above the
entrance read:
“Arbeit macht Frie”
– Work Will Set You
Free. In reality, the
workers were fed so
little that the work
simply killed them.
Entrance to Auschwitz
• By 1941, the death camps
were in full operation in
parts of Poland.
• The Nazis avoided using
camps in Germany as
extermination camps.
Almost all of the most
notorious camps were in
Polish territory. It allowed
the Germans to keep the
true purpose of deportation
a secret until very near the
end of the war.
Why Poland?
The Train Ride
Trains brought thousands
of Jews from the ghettos
to the concentration
camps in Poland.
They had been promised
food and work, and often
volunteered to go to
Poland, hoping that out of
Germany, life might
return to normal.
An end to the Games
• Eventually, the Nazis gave
up any pretext of allowing
the Jews a normal life.
• They began rounding them
up and forcing them to leave
their homes for the camps.
• As the forced deportations
began and Jews were shot for
resisting, an open rebellion
broke out in Warsaw,
Poland.
Fleeing from
the flames
In 1943, many of the
Jews of Warsaw fought
back against the
Germans. The Germans
replied by attacking the
ghetto.
It took months to “liquidate” the ghetto. The uprising was one of the
best know instances of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, but in the
end most of the Jewish residents of Warsaw were dead… either shot
right there in the city, or deported to the gas chambers in Treblinka.
Selections: Life or Death
At the camps, the trains were met by officers who rapidly divided the
Jewish passengers into groups… basically fit for work, and unfit.
Selections: Life or Death
Men and teenage boys were placed into one line, women and
children under 13 in another. An officer then moved through both
groups and further divided them by skills and physical fitness.
Selections: Life or Death
Women accompanied
by children always
died. Children were
of no use in the
camps. The weak died
and those who the
Nazis felt would cause
trouble were selected
for death. About 70%
of the arrivals were
immediately sent to
the gas chambers.
About a thousand at a
time, they were forced to
undress and enter into the
shower look-alike rooms.
Once the rooms were full,
the door was closed and
locked and guards poured
Zyklon B pellets through
vents in the ceiling. Most
people died in just a few
minutes. The Nazis left
the room sealed for
twenty minutes.
The Gas Chambers
The Ovens
The dead were then
removed from the chambers
by Jewish workers and
taken to rooms where they
were searched for gold tooth
fillings and other potential
valuables. Finally, the last
step in the process was the
burning of the body in
specially designed
crematoriums, often just
called “the ovens.”
Shoes waiting to be processed
Taken at the Auschwitz Museum. This represents one day's collection
at the peak of the gassings, about twenty five thousand pairs.
The Work Camps
Most of those sent to a work camp died a much slower
death. The Nazis worked them long hours with little
rest and almost no food. They literally worked them to
death. Some men working under the Nazis lost half
their body weight or more.
Destruction Through Work
This photo was taken by the Nazis to show just how you could quite
literally work the fat of the Jews by feeding them 200 calories a day
Destruction Through Work
Same group of Jews 6 weeks later
Overview
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•
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Heritage of Hate
Early Persecutions
Rounding them up
Final Solution
The Camps
Liberation and Coping
Liberation
The allies discovered the camps
in 1945 as the Russians entered
Poland. While Americans were
appalled at the concentration
camps, it was Russia that
discovered the death camps of
Poland.
Liberation
Many Jews remained in
the camps even after the
gates were opened.
Their homes destroyed,
there was no place else
to go.
Some awaited permits to
come to the United
States, but many went to
Israel.
Liberation
One of the most
unfortunate things that
happened during the
liberation of the camps
was born out of care and
kindness. The emaciated
victims of Hitler’s camps
were near starvation.
Well meaning American GI’s did just what you would do… they
fed the hungry. The act of kindness killed hundreds of Jews, who
were no longer used to solid food. Their bodies were unable to
take the sudden meals.
Liberation
Top American and British Generals visited the camps. Their
reactions were to say the least, predictable… they were shocked
beyond belief, even though they were warned what to expect!
Liberation
Nuremburg
Soon after the war, the Allies convened war crimes trials at
Nuremburg, Germany. The international court brought charges
against many former Nazis, seeking to bring them to justice. 22
Nazi leaders were indicted for “Crimes against humanity.” 12
were sentenced to death, 7 to life in prison and 3 were acquitted.
The court also declared the Nazi party to be a criminal
organization.