Main Idea
• During the Holocaust, Hitler’s Nazis killed six million Jews and five million other “non-Aryans”.
• The violence against Jews during the Holocaust led to the founding of Israel after World War II.
Introduction
• Nazis proposed a new racial order.• Claimed that Germanic people or “Aryans” were
the master race.• Aryan actually refers to the Indo-European
peoples who began to migrate into the Indian subcontinent around 1500. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IE_countries.svg
• Nazis believed that non-Aryans were inferior.• Belief led to the Holocaust, systematic slaughter
of Jews and other groups judged inferior by the Nazis.
The Holocaust Begins
• For generations, many Germans, along with other Europeans, had targeted Jews as the cause for their failures.
• Some Germans even blamed Jews for their country’s defeat in World War I and for its economic problems after the war.
• Nazis made targeting Jews a government policy.• The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, deprived
Jews of their rights to German citizenship and forbade marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
• Laws also limited the kinds of work that Jews could do.
Night of the Broken Glass
• Herschel Grynszpan, a 17 year old Jewish boy, shot a German diplomat after hearing that his father had been deported from Germany to Poland.
• Germans are furious and, in response, they launch a violent attack on the Jewish community.
• November 9 – storm troopers kill around 100 Jews.
• Main streets were covered in shattered glass.– Kristallnacht – “Night of Broken Glass”
A Flood of Refugees
• After Kristallnacht, some Jews realized that violence against them would only increase.
• Many Jews fled Germany.
• Hitler later conquers other territory in which millions of Jews lived.
Emigration Solution
• At first Hitler favored the idea of emigration as a way to rid Germany of the Jews.
• After admitting tens of thousand of Jewish refugees, countries closed their doors.– France, Great Britain, and the United States
• Germany took this as meaning that the other countries agreed that Jews were lesser beings.
Isolating the Jews
• Since emigration was not working out, Hitler devised another plan.
• He ordered that Jews, in countries he had control over, be moved to designated cities.
• Nazis herded Jews into overcrowded ghettos.– Sealed them off with barbed wire and stone walls.
• Hitler’s hope?• Jews would starve and die from disease.
Jewish Resistance
• Despite horrid living conditions, Jews still hung on.
• Some formed resistance organizations within the ghettos.
• Struggled to keep their traditions.• Teachers taught lessons in secret schools.• Scholars kept records so that people would
one day find out the truth.
The “Final Solution”
• Hitler grew impatient waiting for Jews to die from starvation or disease.
• He developed a plan for direct action called the “Final Solution”.
• The Final Solution was a program of genocide (the systematic killing of an entire people).
The Aryan Race
• Hitler believed that his plan of conquest depended on the purity of the Aryan race.
• In order to protect the racial purity, he had to eliminate other races, nationalities and other “subhuman” groups.
• Inferior groups – Gypsies, Poles, Russians, homosexuals, insane, disabled, incurably ill and of course, the Jews.
The Killings Begin
• Hitler’s security force moves from town to town across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to eliminate Jews.
• Once Jews were rounded up, they placed them in pits and shot them, creating mass graves.
• Some Jews were taken to concentration camps (slave-labor prisons).– Germany and Poland
• Hitler once again hoped that the horrible conditions would speed up the total elimination of Jews.
Conditions
• Prisoners worked seven days a week as slaves.
• Severely beaten or killed if they did not work fast enough.
• Meals – thin soup, scrap bread and potato peelings.
• Most prisoners lost 50 pounds in first few months.
• “If a bit of soup spilled over, prisoners would…dig their spoons into the mud and stuff the mess in their mouths.”
The Final Stage
• Final Solution reached its last stage in 1942.
• Nazis now had extermination camps with gas chambers.– Kill up to 6,000 people in one day.
• At Auschwitz, prisoners were first seen by a panel of doctors.
• The doctors decided whether they were weak or strong.
• If they were weak, they were executed that day.– Mainly women, children, elderly and
the sick.
The Executions
• The weak were told to undress and shower.
• They were led to a chamber with fake showerheads.
• Cyanide gas poured from the shower heads and killed the people within a matter of minutes.
• What did they do with all the bodies?
• Soon, Nazis installed crematoriums.
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