Transcript Abraham Malik, describing his experience in the Kovno Ghetto

The Holocaust
A look at one of history’s worst genocides
Essential Question
 Could the United States have done more to prevent the
Holocaust?
 Was WWII a ‘good’ war?
A Look at the Numbers
~ Roughly 9 million European Jews affected by the
Holocaust
~ Total of 6 million Jews were ‘exterminated’ by the Nazis
(does not take into account non-Jewish deaths)
~Non-Jewish population included; Poles, Slavs, Soviets,
deaf, blind, mentally ill, homosexuals, anyone with a
heredity disorder, political opponents, and dissenters
~All told, nearly 17 million people (Germans included)
were killed during the Holocaust
Introduction
 Literal meaning= holo- “whole” and kaustos- “burnt”
 Attempt by the Nazis and Hitler to kill all European
Jews
 Estimated 6 million Jews were exterminated in gas
chambers and concentration camps
 Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck
The Beginning
 Weimar Republic is weak and ineffective
 Parliament is made up of many different political parties
 Huge election is held where Hitler loses
 Republic votes in Hitler as Chancellor of Germany
 Hitler takes control of Germany, leader of the Nazi
party
Adolf Hitler
 Born April 20, 1889 in Austria
 Was a terrible student and eventually expelled from
Realschule (Hitler’s primary school)
 Well decorated Corporal in WWI
 Arrested after a failed attempt to take over the Weimar
Republic
 In prison he wrote Mein Kampf
 Became Chancellor of Germany in 1933
 Married to Eva Braun
Nuremberg Laws
 Included but not limited to:
 Marrying non-Jewish people was forbidden
 Jews may not be employ non-Jews under the age of 45
 Forbidden to display the symbol of the Reich and
national flag
 Penalties for breaking these laws included fines and
imprisonment with hard labor.
Spiraling out of Control
 Anyone of Jewish decent or a convert from Judaism
after 1871 was harassed and subject to public
humiliation.
 Jewish businesses were boycotted
 Jewish lawyers and judges were disbarred, teachers and
doctors thrown out, farmers farms seized, etc.
Eugenics
 Classifying human beings through quantification of
human characteristics
 Used to establish the “master race” and weed out those
who did not belong
Mass Emigration
 Jews all over Germany and occupied lands were
desperately trying to get out.
 Waiting lists were 53,000+ long.
 300,000 Jews applied for visas~ 100,000 were granted
 Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud among emigrants
 All emigrants had to pay the next years taxes, many
losing at least 90% of all assets
The St. Louis
 German cruise liner leaving Germany with 1,000 Jews
aboard
 Turned away by Cuba, United States, and Canada
 Forced to return back to Germany
 Nearly all 1,000 aboard were put into concentration
camps
Kristallnacht 1938
 Nov. 7
 Nazi diplomat was murdered by a Jewish minor
 “Night of Broken Glass” began
 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,700 synagogues were
destroyed
 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps
Ghettos
 Parts of cities were turned into ‘staging areas’ for Jews
who were to be rounded up and sent to concentration
camps for hard labor and extermination
 Judenrat- German appointed Jewish council
 Warsaw was the largest ghetto with 400,000
 Conditions were very crowded
 Avg. 9.2 people per room
 Deaths were high in the ghettos due to starvation,
disease, and typhoid
Pogroms
 Mass killings of Jews within the ghettos by either S.S.
soldiers or rioting mobs let loose by the Nazis.
 The Germans came, the police, and they started banging
houses: "Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus." ... One baby started
to cry ... The other baby started crying. So the mother
urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet
... [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out.
And one baby was dead ... from fear, the mother [had] choked
her own baby.
”
—Abraham Malik, describing his experience in the Kovno
Ghetto
Concentration/Death
Camps
 Arrived on heavily crowded railway cars and escorted
out to be decontaminated including shaving of head
and separated into men and women
 Stripped of all possessions and given prisoners uniform
 Forced to partake in 12-14 hrs of hard labor with very
little rationing
 Died from either exhaustion, exposure, maltreatment,
firing squad, or gassed
Medical Experiments
 Effects of hypothermia
 Treatment for Malaria
 Effects of drinking sea water
 Effects and treatment of mustard gas and poisons
 Forced sterilization
 Effects and treatment of explosive burns
 Subject to pressurized chambers