The Holocaust Chapter 16 Section 3

The Holocaust Begins As part of the Nazi vision of Europe, the Germanic people considered Aryan were considered the “master race.” Everyone else, mainly Jewish people, were considered inferior. This racist message would eventually lead to the mass slaughter, known as the Holocaust, of Jews and other groups deemed inferior by the Nazis. The Nazis knowingly tapped into a hatred for Jews that had deep roots in European history. However, they misused the term Aryan which correctly refers to the Indo-European peoples who began to migrate into the Indian subcontinent around 1500 B.C.)

Anti -Semitism This is the term given to political, social and economic agitation against Jews. In simple terms it means ‘Hatred of Jews’. Aryan Race This was the name of what Hitler believed was the perfect race. These were people with full German blood, blonde hair and blue eyes.

In time, Nazis made the targeting of Jews a government policy. Some Germans blamed Jews for the Germans loss of WWI and for their economic hardships. The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, deprived Jews of their rights to German citizenship and forbade marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Laws passed later also limited the kind of work that the Jews could do.

Why blame the Jews? Christian Europe had a long history of anti- Jewish violence, starting during the Middle Ages and stemming from a twisted belief that blamed the death of Jesus on the Jews, not the Romans.

Kristallnacht Aka The Night of Broken Glass November 1938, a 17 year-old Jewish youth (Herschel Grynszpan) from Germany, while visiting his uncle in Paris, received a post card that said his father who had lived in Germany for 27 years was being deported to Poland. On November 7, to avenge his father, the boy shot a German diplomat living in Paris. On November 9, Nazi storm troopers attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany murdering about 100 Jews.

November 9 became known as Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass.” This night marked a huge step in the Nazi policy of Jewish persecution. After Kristallnacht, some Jews realized that violence against them was bound to increase. By the end of 1939, a number of German Jews fled to other countries. At first, Hitler favored emigration as a solution to what he referred to as the “Jewish problem.” After admitting tens of thousands of Jewish refugees many countries such as France, Britain, and the United States closed their doors to further immigration.

What is shocking about the Holocaust is that all of the rest of the world made little attempt to save the Jewish people from being exterminated. The major Catholic and Protestant Church leaders across the world were silent as the Nazis began their killing. The United States even refused to allow a large passenger ship full of hundreds of Jewish refugees to enter the U.S. and turned it back to Germany. A few brave individuals from many nationalities: Germans, Danes, Dutch, and French, quietly hid Jewish children and friends from the Nazis.

One of the few countries to openly accept Jewish refugees throughout the war was the Muslim One of the few countries to openly accept Jewish refugees throughout the war was the Muslim country of Turkey (which also had accepted Jewish refugees fleeing the Christians in Spain in 1492). The state of Israel in 1947, after WWII, was set up as a reaction to the Nazi Holocaust so that the Jewish people could set up their own homeland.

When emigration did not get rid of the Jews, Hitler ordered all countries under his control to move all Jews to designated cities. In those cities, the Nazis herded the Jews into dismal, overcrowded ghettos, or segregated Jewish areas. Ghettos were sealed off with barbed wire or stone walls. The hope was that the Jews would starve to death or die from disease. After 1941, all Jews in German controlled areas had to wear a yellow star of David patch.

In the Ghettos Jews hung on in the ghettos: Organized resistance groups Struggled to keep traditions Produced plays and concerts Teachers taught lesson in secret schools Scholars kept records in hopes that people would find out the truth.

The Final Solution Hitler grew impatient waiting for Jews to die from disease an starvation so he decided implement his plan called the “Final Solution.” His plan was actually a program of genocide, the systematic killing of an entire people. Hitler believed that the plan of conquest depended on the purity of the Aryan race which meant to protect racial purity meant eliminating other races, nationalities, or groups they felt were “sub-human.”

Who were these inferior or sub-human people? Jews, gypsies, Poles, Russians, homosexuals, sympathetic Germans, the insane, the disabled, and the incurably ill. However, the main focus was on the Jews. Units from the SS (Hitler’s elite security), moved from town to town to hunt down Jews. Men, women, children and even babies were rounded up and taken to isolated spots. They would then shoot their prisoners in pits that became the prisoners’ graves.

Between 1939 and 1945 six million Jews were murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of others, such as Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled and the mentally ill.

Those that were not reached by the killing squads were taken to concentration camps or slave- labor camps in Germany and Poland. Hitler hoped here, prisoners would die more quickly. The prisoners worked seven days as week as slaves for the SS or the German business. Prisoners were beaten or killed for not working fast enough. Meals consisted of soup, bread scraps, and potato peelings. This diet resulted in the loss of about 50 pounds for many in the first few months.

The Final Stage The “Final Solution” reached its final stage in Nazis built extermination camps with gas chambers that could kill as many as 6,000 human beings in a day. Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination camps Here, prisoners would parade in front of a committee of SS doctors. The doctors would separate the strong (mainly men) from the weak (mostly women, children, and the elderly, and the sick) Those labeled sick would be killed that day. Those that were sick were told to strip down and led to “shower chamber” with fake shower head. Only once the doors closed, cyanide gas poured out the showerheads.

All were killed in a matter of minutes. Later, the Nazis built crematoriums or ovens to burn the bodies.

A Total of 6,000,000 Jews Percentage of Jews killed in each country

A MAP OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEATH CAMPS USED BY THE NAZIS.

16 of the 44 children taken from a French children’s home. They were sent to a concentration camp and later to Auschwitz. ONLY 1 SURVIVED A group of children at a concentration camp in Poland.

Part of a stockpile of Zyklon-B poison gas pellets found at Majdanek death camp. Before poison gas was used, Jews were gassed in mobile gas vans. Carbon monoxide gas from the engine’s exhaust was fed into the sealed rear compartment. Victims were dead by the time they reached the burial site.

Smoke rises as the bodies are burnt.

Portrait of two-year-old Mania Halef, a Jewish child who was among the 33,771 persons shot by the SS during the mass executions at Babi Yar, September, 1941.

Nazis sift through a huge pile of clothes left by victims of the massacre. Two year old Mani Halef’s clothes are somewhere amongst these.

After liberation, an Allied soldier displays a stash of gold wedding rings taken from victims at Buchenwald. Bales of hair shaven from women at Auschwitz, used to make felt-yarn.

Soviet POWs at forced labor in 1943 exhuming bodies in the ravine at Babi Yar, where the Nazis had murdered over 33,000 Jews in September of In 1943, when the number of murdered Jews exceeded 1 million. Nazis ordered the bodies of those buried to be dug up and burned to destroy all traces.

Did anyone try and help? Of course, with the help of non-Jewish people, and at great risk to themselves, rescuers hid Jews in their homes or helped them escape to neutral countries.

How was it that Anne Frank’s Diary Survived WWII? Anne Frank, a young German-Jewish girl, wrote a diary which captured 26 months of hiding from German authorities in Amsterdam during WWII. Her notebooks and papers had been left behind by the secret police in the Frank’s family hiding place. Two Dutch women who had helped the fugitives survive, gave the papers to Anne’s father, Otto Frank when he returned from Auschwitz. Anne had caught typhoid fever in Bergen-Belsen and died 2 months before German surrender. Of the eight who hid with Anne, only her father survived.