Transcript Hitler and the Holocaust

The Quest for a Pure Germany
 Jews
vs Arabs in Middle East
 Jews are always immigrants world-wide
 Economic reputation as wealthy, stingy,
savvy with money
 Political reputation as plotters of world
dominance
 Fear of Zionism—a Jewish homeland in
Palestine would be like a Vatican-a
headquarters for spreading their ideas
 Several
times in European history, Jews
were targeted for expulsion from the area
or killed:
• Ancient Greece & Rome
• Some Christians since their beginnings— “Jews
killed Jesus”
• Spanish Inquisition (1492)
• Late 1800s Europe—grew into Nazism; a racial
ideology
 Extreme
nationalism: Purify Germany.
Leave only Aryans.
 Jews as a race, were seen as the #1 threat
to national security & purity
• scapegoat
 Hitler’s
message was meant to be taken
as a whole—if you didn’t like part of it,
get over it
 Read the excerpts from Mein Kampf to try
and grasp Hitler’s antisemitism
 525,000
Jews lived in Germany
 No real sense of panic—Jews were
directed to remain calm
 Would the Nazis even stay in power?
 Most discrimination included boycotting
Jewish stores, breaking their windows,
avoiding them in public/disassociation
 Some killings by SA/SS/Gestapo
 Jews
 Anyone
with birth defects—and they
were supposed to be sterilized so as not
to have children with birth defects
 Gypsies (Roma), while technically Aryan,
had mingled with the lowest classes of
society and were therefore tainted:
“criminally asocial”
 Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and
anyone who helped save any of the above
Improving the genetic makeup of a population
through the application of science…
 “It will be the task of the People's State to make
the race the centre of the life of the community. It
must make sure that the purity of the racial strain
will be preserved. It must proclaim the truth that
the child is the most valuable possession a
people can have. It must see to it that only those
who are healthy shall beget children; that there is
only one infamy, namely, for parents that are ill or
show hereditary defects to bring children into
the world and that in such cases it is a high
honour to refrain from doing so.”

http://fcit.usf.edu/ho
locaust/resource/doc
ument/DocEuth.htm
 1933: All
Jewish business boycotted
• Marriages between Christians and Jews
prohibited
• Jewish University professors’ classes were
abandoned
• 37,000 of the 525,000 German Jews emigrated
 1934: Night
of the Long Knives (eliminated
all other rivals for power—Hitler is it.)
 1935: Nuremburg Laws:
• 1. Reich flag law—black, red, & white are
national colors, swastika is the national flag
• 2. Citizenship law—distinction between
“citizens” of the Reich (Germans) and “subjects”
of it (all foreigners)
• 3. Law for the Defense of German Blood &
Honor—forbade marriages & all relations
between Germans and Jews
• (Many German Jews at this point hoped for a
manageable segregated but lawful society now.)
 1936: Olympic
Games held in Berlin—no
anti-semitism shown to the world-greatest propaganda feat of all time?
 1938: Anschluss: The annexation of
Austria to Germany; antisemitic behavior
was rampant there immediately
 All German Jews turned in their
passports (no leaving) and had to get
Jewish identity cards
 November
9, 1938: Kristallnacht:
“The Night of Broken Glass”
• Look up
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/knacht.htm
• In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom in
1938, German propaganda minister Goebbels
announced: "The German people is anti-Semitic.
It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to
be provoked in the future by parasites of the
Jewish race."
http://www.history
place.com/worldwa
r2/timeline/knacht.
htm
 September
1, 1939: Germany invades
Poland
• All Polish Jews must wear Star of David
 1939: First
Polish ghetto is established
• Concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald
are used—see link
 1939-1941: Increasing
use of
ghettos to contain Jews and
building of new concentration
camps
Auschwitz
 1942: Many
Jews in concentration camps
are sent to Auschwitz/death camps
 1942-1944: Majority of the captured Jews,
gypsies, and others are deported to
locations to be killed—6 extermination
camps in Poland; ghettos are destroyed
• Resistance movements occur
 1945: Allies
(USA, USSR mostly) liberate
concentration camps
Jewish people
killed as a %
of their prewar
population
 11,000,000
killed (6 m Jews, 5 m others)
 Or, 15-20 million killed &/or imprisoned
 30,000 slave labor camps
 1150 Jewish ghettos
 980 concentration camps
 500 brothels with sex slaves
 Thousands of other camps for
euthanizing the elderly, “purifying” &
“Germanizing” people, sterilizing
facilities…