The Holocaust  Nazi’s propose new racial order  Aryans- master race of Germanic peoples  All non-Aryans were inferior: especially Jewish  Holocaust- mass slaughter of Jews and other groups  (Poles, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Africans, Mentally-Handicapped)  Holocaust begins  Jews became targets of German failures  Nuremberg Laws- took away rights of Jews  Citizenship, marriages

“night of broken glass”  German diplomat shot in Paris  By Grynszpan: for revenge of father being deported to Poland  Germans launch attack on Jews  This night will be known as kristallnacht  Kristallnacht became a major policy of Jewish persecution  Flood of Refugees  Jews will flee Germany  Hitler called it a “Jewish problem”  Other countries will turn down the influx of Jewish immigrants  Isolating the Jews  Hitler will move Jews into Ghettos- segregated Jewish areas  Ghettos were then sealed off with barbed wire & stone walls  Some Jews will form resistance groups in ghettos  Jews will struggle to keep traditions Hitler’s Impatience

The “Final Solution”  Hitler grows impatient  Plan- “final solution” becomes plan for genocide- mass killing of entire people  Plan for conquest depended on purity of Aryan race  Killings begin  Hitler’s SS will hunt down Jews  Shot prisoners in pits  Jews not reached by killing squads went to concentration camps  Final Stage  Extermination camps built with gas chambers  Auschwitz- largest of the camps  The Survivors  6 million will die  Less then 4 million will survive

Liberation from concentration camps

The death march

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS  Why did Hitler begin mass killing of Jews?  Starvation and disease was not killing them fast enough.  What was the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp?  Concentration camps were slave-labor prisons. Extermination camps were for mass murder.