Transcript The Holocaust

The Holocaust
Topic 6.7
• Jews faced persecution for their beliefs for
centuries
• Suffering caused by WWI and the hardships
of the Great Depression
• Many looked for someone to blame
• In Mein Kampf-Hitler revived the idea of Aryan
superiority and expressed hateful views of
Jews
• Particularly mixing of the two “races”
1933 - Hitler Comes to Power
• Hitler makes antiSemitism the official
policy of the Nazi State
• Nazi persecutionexclude German’s Jews
from all aspects of
political, social, and
economic life
Hitler’s Campaign Against the Jews
•Nazi-controlled newspapers
– Attacks on the “Jewish Image” from mass
media
•Jewish children were expelled from school
•Jews were forced to sell their business to
“Aryans” at extremely low prices
Boycotts of Jewish owned business-1933
Berlin April 1, 1933. pickets
distribute boycott pamphlets to
German pedestrians.
"Attention Germans. These Jews (five and
dime) stores are the parasites and
gravediggers of German craftsmen. They pay
starvation wages to German workers.”
• Identity cards with a
red letter J
• Forced to wear
badges identifying
them as being Jewish
– Opens people up to
attacks from Brown
shirts, Police, SS
(Schutzsaffel)
• SS elite private army of
the Nazi party
• Guarded the
concentration camps
1935 - Nuremburg Laws
• Stripped Jews of their
German citizenship
• Outlawed marriage
between Jews and
non-Jews
• Segregated Jews at
every level of society
November 9 1938 –
“Kristallnacht”
• “The Night of the
Broken Glass”
• Mass looting and
destruction of
Jewish houses,
business, and
Synagogues
• Thousands of Jews were
arrested
• Convinced many Jews
that they could not
outlast the Nazis
– Hundreds of thousands of
German Jews began to
seek refuge outside of
Germany
1938 - Evian Conference
 On 7 July 1938
 32 countries
convened to
discuss opening
their borders to
Jewish refugees.
Only the
Dominican
Republic did
Delegates to the Evian Conference,
where the fate of Jewish refugees
from Nazi Germany was discussed.
US delegate Myron Taylor is third
from left.
• 400,000 Polish
Jews were
rounded up and
confined to a
small part of the
city of Warsaw.
• Disease and
Starvation ran
rampant.
• Most would later
be deported to
Death Camps
1939 - Warsaw
Ghetto
1941 - “Einsatzgruppen”
 Mobile killing squads patrolled Nazi occupied
Russia killing Jews
Rounded up their victims drove them to freshly dug pits and shot them
 33,000 in two days at Babi Yar
1942 - Wannsee Conference
• Nazi leaders came together to discuss “the Jewish
Problem”
• The “Final Solution” – Death camps would be
constructed to exterminate all European Jews
– Also – Gypsies, the homeless, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
homosexuals
Different Camps
• Concentration Camps or Forced
labor camps – workers were slowly
starved to death
– Hauling rocks, chopping logs in a
forest, or for the “lucky” ones, working
in a factory for the German war effort.
• Death Camps-People were sent to
death camps for the extermination
• POW Camps – Russian POWs
were worked to death in labor
camps
Concentration and Death Camps
Auschwitz
 Most prisoners were
killed immediately on
arrival in gas
chambers
• The healthiest would be left alive to carry the bodies to
the crematoriums
– Most of these people died within months of arrival of
starvation or disease
United States
Role
• US knew about
the ongoing
Holocaust as
• Press gave little
coverage to the
story
• Roosevelt form
the War
Refugee Board
in 1944
1944 – 1945 Liberation
 As Allied
troops
advanced
through
Germany, they
discovered the
Nazi atrocities
and liberated
camps
“The memory of starved,
dazed, men, who dropped
their eyes and heads when
we looked at them through
the chain-link fence, in the
same manner that a beaten,
mistreated dog would cringe,
leaves feelings that cannot
be described and will never
be forgotten. The impact of
seeing those people behind
that fence left me saying,
only to myself, now I know
why I’m here.”
-Major Richard Winters
November 1945 - Nuremburg
Trials
• “We were just
following orders”
• German Citizens
“We didn’t
know”
• 12 Nazi leaders
were executed
Final Toll of the Holocaust
•
•
•
•
5 to 6 million Jews
1.8 – 1.9 million Christian Poles
200,000–800,000 Gypsies
200,000–300,000 people with
disabilities
• 100,000 Communists
• 10,000–25,000 homosexual men
• 2,500–5,000 Jehovah’s
Witnesses