The Holocaust

Genocide of European Jews and others: the systematic extermination of millions of European Jews, Slavs, intellectuals, homosexual people, and political dissidents by the Nazis and

their allies during World War II.

Adolph Hitler

• Among his goals was the removal of the “non-aryans”

• in particular the Jews

The Holocaust is Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of

European Jews

The numbers

• 6 million Jews - 2/3 of the European Jewish population had been massacred.

• 5-6 million others also died in captivity

By the 1880’s

• Anti-semitism had come to mean hostility towards Jews.

• When the Nazi party took over in 1933, anti-semitism became the official policy of the nation.

Nuremberg Laws

• 1935

• Stripped Jews of citizenship.

• Forbid marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

Nuremberg Laws

• Dismissed Jewish employees and managers

• Jews were marked with a red letter J

• All Jewish women were given the middle name of Sarah, men were given the middle name of Israel.

Concentration Camps

• Places where POW’s were confined, under harsh conditions. They soon held many other undesirable people, including the homeless, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, people with mental and physical disabilities and gypsies.

Organized attacks on Jews begin in early 1938.

Where can they go?

• 1933-1937 Jews seek to escape Germany

• They go to Palestine, Latin America and the U.S.

Roosevelt calls for a conference

• He wants to discuss the growing numbers of Jews.

• The conference fails to deal with the situation.

• U.S. does not ease its immigration laws.

With the invasion of Poland in 1939,

2 million Jews are put under German control.

The Warsaw Ghetto

• Jews were rounded up and confined in the Warsaw Ghetto

• It was sealed off by a wall and topped with barbed wire (when possible)

• Hunger, overcrowding and lack of sanitation brought on disease.

Einsatzgruppers• Or mobile killing units

were sent to Poland in 1939.• They murdered upper-class

citizens, intellectuals, priests and influential Jews.

• In 1941 they were sent to eliminate Communist political leaders in the Soviet Union

Digging their own graves before execution.

Hitler

• Accepts mass murder by firing squad as appropriate for a war zone

• but not for nations already conquered.

January 1942- The Wannsee Conference

Germany plans for the “Final solution to the Jewish Question”

The plan called for special concentration camps, where genocide or deliberate destruction, of Europe’s Jewish population was to be carried

out.

1941

• Nazi’s experiment to find out the most efficient way of killing people.

• They chose a poison gas to be administered in special chambers, disguised as showers

• on the first day 2300 Jews were killed.

Death Camps

• They exist only for mass murder

• Jews were transported to the extermination centers.

• Most of them did not know where they were going when they boarded the trains.

From “The Auschwitz Album”, the only photographic documentation of the entire extermination process at Auschwitz. An SS has just sent the woman with the infant to join those being sent to the crematoria; her hair is covered in the tradition of the Orthodox Jewish wife. A man is standing between the columns missing his pants and one shoe; this was a common occurrence in

the overcrowded boxcars

Gas Chambers

• The elderly• most women and

children• and those who looked

weak were put into gas chambers and killed.

Crematoria

• Guards had prisoners take the dead bodies to a crematoria, where the bodies were burned in huge ovens.

Men and women who escaped immediate death had their heads shaved and a registration number

tattooed on their arms.Their barracks had no bathrooms

or beds.There food was usually a soup made of rotten vegetables.

Some Jewish resistance

• April 1943- 700 Jews armed with pistols and homemade bombs, hold out against 2000 Germans with tanks.

• Most escape attempts failed, but a few people managed to bring word of the death camps to the outside world.

U.S. response

• We show little interest in the Holocaust during the war years.

• Immigrant quotas were not raised

• existing quotas for Jews were not filled.

FDR creates the War Refugee Board

• Try to help people threatened by the Nazi’s

Oskar Schindler

• Employs 1300 Jews in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

• These jobs saved them from being shipped to the gas chamber.

As allied armies advanced in late 1944, the Nazi’s abandoned

concentration camps outside of Germany and moved prisoners to

German soil.

May 1945

• As Germany collapsed, American troops are able to witness the horrors of the Holocaust.

Nuremberg Trials

• Allies place 24 leading Nazi’s on trial for crimes against humanity

• At the Nuremberg trials, 12 received death sentences.

An important principle is established. . .

Individuals were responsible for their own actions. No longer could you

say that you were “following orders.”

Numbers to know

• Poland lost the most Jews during the Holocaust

• 88-91% of the Jewish Polish population was lost

• Lithuania and Greece lost the second most in terms of percentages.

• Italy lost the least amount of Jews.

Depressingbut important information

11 question quiz coming up.All fill-in-the-blanks

Standards

Analyze the causes of WWII including:

a. Appeasement

b. Axis expansion

c. The role of the allies

Analyze the consequences of WWII including:

a. Atomic weaponsb. Civilian and military loses

c. The Holocaust and its impactd. Refugees and povertye. The United Nations

Analyze the results of political, economic and social oppression

and the violation of human rights including:

a. The exploitation of indigenous people

b. the Holocaust and other acts of genocide

Analyze how governments and other groups have used

propaganda to influence public opinion and behavior

Detect bias and propaganda in primary and secondary sources of

information

Develop and present a research project including:

a. Collection of datab. Narrowing and refining a

topicc. Construction and support of a

thesis

Analyze the impact of U.S. participation in WWII, with

emphasis on the change from isolationism to international involvement including the

reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Analyze the impact of the U.S. participation in WWII with

emphasis ona. Events on the home front to

support the war effort, including industrial mobilization, women and minorities in the workforceb. The internment of Japanese-

Americans