Transcript World History: Holocaust

Concentration and Death Camps, Events, and People
Fall 09: Ms. McKevitt
 The Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933.
 The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the
true nature of their crimes.
 As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans persecuted
and murdered millions of other people.
 Approximately, 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust.
 The Nazis established concentration camps to imprison political
opponents, Jews and other people targeted on ethnic or “racial”
grounds.
 The Warsaw ghetto uprising that occurred in April-May 1943 was indeed one of
the largest armed uprising in the history of organized resistance to the Nazis. It
was sparked by rumors that the Nazis would deport the remaining ghetto
inhabitants to the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.
 The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest, symbolically most important
Jewish uprising, and the first urban uprising, in German-occupied Europe.

Adam Czerniakow was ordered to give the Nazis six thousand Jews a day for the
trains. He committed suicide in the Warsaw Ghetto on July 23, 1942.
 He is remembered for his controversial speech, Give Me Your Children in which
he pleaded with the Jews in the ghetto to give up children younger than ten
years of age, as well as the old and the sick, so that others might survive.
 With the Soviet forces at the gates of Berlin on April 30, 1945, Hitler preferred
to kill himself rather than to be caught and take responsibility for his action
during the war. His long-term mistress and new bride, Eva Braun, joined him
in his suicide.
Adolf Hitler
"When I came to power, I
did not want the
concentration camps to
become old age
pensioners homes, but
instruments of terror.“ –
Adolf Hitler
The Chancellor of
Germany, appointed
in 1933.
Elie Wiesel
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever
human beings endure suffering and humiliation.
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the
oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the
tormentor, never the tormented.” –Elie Wiesel
A Holocaust victim who
survived and became the
recipient of the 1986
Nobel Peace Prize
A young girl who died
in the Holocaust but
whose memories
survive through the
diary she kept.
"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are
being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is
treating them very roughly and transporting them
in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in
Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If
it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in
those faraway and uncivilized places where the
Germans are sending them? We assume that most
of them are being murdered. The English radio
says they're being gassed." –Anne Frank
The Head of the
Gestapo section for
Jewish affairs.
“To sum it all up, I must say that I regret
nothing.” –Adolf Eichmann
“Would you rather
have butter or guns?
Preparedness makes
us powerful. Butter
merely makes us fat.”
The Nazi leader who wrote the memo asking an SS officer to prepare a plan
for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” – mass exterminationHermann Goering
Oskar Schindler (center) with
some of his Jewish workers at the
Krakow enamel factory, 1943
“I was now resolved to do
everything in my power to
defeat the system.” –Oskar
Schindler
Oskar Schindler was declared a
'Righteous Person' by the
Israelis. This was a Jewish honor
bestowed on Gentiles, based on
Jewish tradition. Oskar died in
1974 in Frankfurt.
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Country
Germany proper
Austria
Eastern territories
General Government
Bialystok
Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Belgium
Denmark
France / occupied territory
unoccupied territory
Greece
Netherlands
Norway
Number
131,800
43,700
420,000
2,284,000
400,000
74,200
- free of Jews 3,500
34,000
43,000
5,600
165,000
700,000
69,600
160,800
1,300
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Country
Bulgaria
England
Finland
Ireland
Italy including Sardinia
Albania
Croatia
Portugal
Rumania including Bessarabia
Sweden
Switzerland
Serbia
Slovakia
Spain
Turkey (European portion)
Hungary
USSR
Ukraine
White Russia excluding Bialystok
Number
48,000
330,000
2,300
4,000
58,000
200
40,000
3,000
342,000
8,000
18,000
10,000
88,000
6,000
55,500
742,800
5,000,000
2,994,684
446,484
Total= 11,000,000
Camp
 Auschwitz
Location
Established Number
Murdered
Poland (near Krakow)
May 1940
1,100,000
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Belzec
Belzec, Poland
March 1942
600,000
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Bergen-Belsen
Germany (near Hanover)
April 1943
35,000
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Chelmno
Chelmno, Poland
Dec. 1941
320,000
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Dachau
Germany (near Munich)
March 1933
32,000
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Majdanek
Lublin, Poland
February 1943
360,000
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Mauthausen
August 1938
120,000
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Stutthof
Poland (near Danzig)
Sept. 1939
65,000
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Treblinka
Poland (near Warsaw)
July 1942
n/a
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Westerbork
Westerbork, Netherlands
October 1939
n/a
Austria (near Linz)
 Auschwitz was established in May, 1940 and was divided into three major
camps. It was liberated by Soviet troops on 25 January, 1945.
 Most of the inmates who escaped were either recaptured or shot.
 Dachau opened officially in Germany on Wednesday, March 22, 1933 and
ultimately had a further 133 sub-camps. It was originally planned to house
political prisoners and could accommodate 5000 inmates.
 Ravensbrueck was located in Germany. Many brutal experiments were
performed on the women there.
 These mass murder camps were: Auschwitz II, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek,
Sobibor and Treblinka. Their sole purpose was extermination. All were located
in Poland.
 It is estimated that over 3,000,000 Polish Jews were murdered by the
Nazis.
 Zyklon B gas was a colorless gas with a bitter almond smell. People
being gassed suffered terrible fear, dizziness and vomiting before dying
of asphyxiation.
 Westerbork was a stop-over for prisoners before being shipped off to
other camps usually in Germany or Poland. Westerbork was located in
Holland. Bergen-Belsen was a special camp for people with diseases.
 Kapos were hated: they were, after all, collaborator and they were
usually cruel and sadistic and would do anything to retain their
position.
 Count Folke Bernadotte, vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, more than
15,000 Concentration Camp victims were allowed into neutral territory. 7,500
of these were inmates from Ravensbrueck, the only camp built specifically for
female prisoners, and in operation since May 15, 1939. (A small camp for men
was added later.)
 Gypsies were originally thought to be members of the original Aryan race, and
were initially not persecuted. But the Nazis came to see their nomadic lifestyle
as an affront to their ideals, and they became a marked people. Slavs had
always been on the Nazis' Wanted Lists, as their inferiority to the Germanic
race had never been questioned. Granted, if the people of Slavic nations
cooperated with the Nazis, such as the brutal Croatian Ustaša, the Hlinka
Guard of Slovakia, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and the thousands of Ukranian
SS members, they were more than happy to work with them.
 Most people would probably think Poland suffered the heaviest losses of its
Jewish community during the war, and they did indeed suffer heavily, losing
88% of the 3,300,000 Jews who lived in the country. Greece's Jewish population
was reduced by 80%, 65,000 dying in camps, ghettos, or by other means.
Germany lost 130,000 Jews, just over 55% of those still in the country at the
start of World War II. By contrast, Lithuania was almost completely "Judenrein"
("cleansed" of Jews). Only 6% of its Jewish population survived to see the
liberation.
 Auschwitz was the biggest and most infamous camp of all. 75%
of those who arrived there were killed soon after arrival.
 After being killed, all prisoners were either cremated or buried in
mass graves. Other prisoners, called the "Sonderkommando"
("special squad") were forced to move corpses from the gas
chambers to the crematoria or bury the dead in mass graves.
 Anne Frank did go to Auschwitz, but was moved to Bergen-
Belsen with her elder sister, Margot. Their mother, Edith, had to
stay in Auschwitz. None of these three survived. Anne was the
last of them to die. She died of typhus 5-6 weeks before BergenBelsen was liberated by the British on 15 April 1945.
 In March 1946 Rudolf Höss was arrested. He gave evidence at
Nuremberg and was then flown to Krakow where he was handed
over to the Poles. He was tried, convicted and in April 1947 he
was hanged in Auschwitz camp.
 Auschwitz was, among other things, a work camp, so they
needed strong and healthy men to work there. After the start of
the Holocaust in 1942 most prisoners were brought to Auschwitz
to be killed, though people's hopes sometimes rose when they
saw the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei". Most women and
children didn't survive long.
 The SS did not want children under about 14. Only the strongest
and healthiest survived the arrival. When prisoners started
getting sick, they were killed right away, mostly in gas chambers.
"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at
a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals"
Theodor Adorno
Dead bodies of the victims in Auschwitz.
Child survivors of the Holocaust filmed during
the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp
by the Red Army, January, 1945.
 About 1.1-1.6 million Jews died at that terrible camp, all because
of Nazi racial theories.
 Josef Mengele the "Angel of Death", he was the one who
determined who would be killed, and who would be forced to
work.
 Guards, usually German prisoners, kept the other prisoners
under control. One of the more loathsome aspects of the
Holocaust was the fact that some of the victims were forced to be
oppressors too.
 The Death Head units (Totenkopfverände) of the SS or
Schutzstaffel (which literally means "protection squadron") ran
all the concentration camps from 1934 onwards.