1. The Holocaust

2. What is the Holocaust?
The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime during World War 2.
In 1933, approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war.
By 1945, two out of every three European Jews had been killed.

4. Piles of eyeglasses owned by Holocaust victims.

5. Why did the Holocaust happen?
The Holocaust occurred because Hitler and the Nazis were racist. They believed the German people were a 'master race,' who were superior to others.
The Nazis created a league table of 'races' with the Aryans at the top and with Jews, Gypsies, and black people at the bottom. These 'inferior' people were seen as a threat to the purity of the German nation.
When the Nazis came to power, they persecuted these people, took away their human rights, and eventually decided that they should be exterminated.

6. Circa 1935: two Jewish pupils are humiliated before their classmates
Circa 1935: two Jewish pupils are humiliated before their classmates. The inscription on the blackboard reads "The Jew is our greatest enemy, beware of the Jew.”

7. Who were the Nazis?
The Nazis were an ultra conservative political party headed by Adolf Hitler.
In 1933, they assumed power of Germany.
They created an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and suspicion.

8. What happened to the Jews?
The Jews were forced to live in ghettos, or small, locked-in communities within larger cities. The conditions were unhealthy and very crowded.
From there, Jews were deported by the thousands to labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps.
Unless they were useful to the Nazis, they were killed. This was part of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” or the Nazi plan to destroy all the Jews of Europe.

9. European Concentration Camps

10. What is a death camp? How many? Where?
A death camp camp is a concentration camp with special apparatus especially designed for mass murder.
Six such camps existed: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Tremblinka. All were located in Poland.

11. A mass grave of Jewish bodies, lying in a ditch in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

13. What was Auschwitz-Birkenau?
Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing center where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed.
An estimated three million people were eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning.
After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine.

14. At Auschwitz, so-called camp doctors--physicians and surgeons--performed vile and potentially lethal medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, and tortured Jewish children, Gypsy children, and many others.
“Patients” were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to various other traumas.

15. Children subjected to medical experiments in Auschwitz.

16. Scenes of horror at Auschwitz, where body parts were kept and used for experiments.