The Holocaust 24.4

Objectives Trace the roots and progress of Hitler’s campaign against the Jews. Explore the goals of Hitler’s “final solution” and the nature of the Nazi death camps. Examine how the United States responded ot the Holocaust.

Key Parts Roots of the Holocaust Nazis Adopt the Final Solution The Allies and the Holocaust

Introduction Read section 24.4 Answer critical thinking questions 4-5.

Roots of the Holocaust The mass murders of Jews, as well as other undesirables, were a direct result of a racist Nazi ideology that considered Aryans superior to other people. From the start of the Nazi movement Hitler blamed the Jews for anything negative in Germany. It began with the boycotting of all Jewish business and barred Jews from getting any other types of jobs.

Cont. Jews began getting segregated and denied citizenship. Hitler filled the German school with propaganda and text books that showed all other races as inferior and especially the Jews. The elementary schools were some of the worst due to the malleable minds of the young ones.

Cont.. Acts of violence against Jews were common. The most serious attack occurred on November 9,1938. This was known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass. A Jewish refugee killed a German diplomat in Paris. Nazi official ordered attacks on Jews in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland.

Cont… They destroyed 1,500 Jewish synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses and killed 200 jews. Roughly 129,000 Jews fled Germany and Austria from 1933-1937. One of the most famous was Albert Einstein. In 1939 the Ocean Liner St. Louis had 900 Jewish passengers on it to try and come into America. All but 22 were denied and shipped back to Germany. (600 of these passengers died in the Holocaust)

Nazis Adopt the “Final Solution” In 1933 Hitler opened the first Nazi concentration camps. The first camps were Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. In Theory the initial concentration camps were not designed to kill, but to turn its occupants into useful members of the Third Reich. The camps were for Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, beggars, drunkards, conscientious objectors, disabled, and mentally retarded.

Cont. Death via starvation in these camps were a daily occurrence. Also medical experimentations we done on thousands of the prisoners without anesthesia. Also they practiced different forms of torture to see how much the human body can take. Also practiced to see the effects of oxygen deprivation, hypothermia, and effects of altitude.

Cont.. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 Nazi leaders made the decision to move toward Hitler’s Final Solution, genocide of the Jews. Reinhard Heydrich was known as the man with an iron heart and he came up with the plan to exterminate 11,000,000 Jews. So the construction now of Death Camps began.

Cont… The largest death camp was Auschwitz, and others were; Treblinka, Maidenek, Sobibor, Belsec, Chelmno. Prisoners were shipped by train to the death camps and tightly crammed in the death chambers that were pumped with carbon monoxide to kill them. Also they would put the prisoners in shower like facilities and released the insecticide Zyklon B.

Cont…. Human fat was turned into soap. Human hair woven into whigs, slippers, and mattresses. By 1945 about 6 million European Jews had been murdered and roughly 5 million other undesirables were dead. The unfortunate part was there were many that lived and are constantly haunted by nightmares.

The Allies and the Holocaust By 1944 FDR establish the War Refugee Board to begin the liberation of the camp victims. Once American Soldiers saw the camps and the piles of dead bodies, warehouses of human hair, and ashes in the crematories, they began the full campaign of allied liberation of Jews. Truman became the biggest supporter of the Jewish state that formed in Palestine in 1948.