24.3: Holocaust

Objective: Understand the fate of Jews and other “enemies” under the Third Reich

9,508,340 Jews in Europe before WWII

5,962,129 killed by Nazis = 63% of population

Jews are half of 11 million Holocaust victims

HOLOCAUST• 1933 – Nazis open concentration camps

• 11/9/1938 – Kristallnacht

• 10/1939 – euthanasia of “undesirables” in hospitals

• 3/1941 – SS Einsatzgruppen (murder squads) formed

http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/einsatz.html7/1941- Hitler urges “final solution” to “Jewish Question”

GENOCIDE• 12/1941 – gassing of Jews, Gypsies, Catholics begins

http://www.2goglobal.com/2GoChronicals/2%20Go%20Photos/Europe/Poland/auschwitz_ii.htm

http://timewitnesses.org/english/Kristall.html

                                                                 

Jews arrested during Kristallnacht line up for roll call at the Buchenwald concentration camp. November 1938. Lorenz C. Schmuhl Papers, USHMM Archives

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/genocide/racial_state_01.shtml

May 13, 1939In Hamburg, 1,000 Jewish refugees board the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, for trip to Cuba, where they hope to find temporary refuge. Cuba and Miami turn them away. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/timeline.html

What were the reasons the US gave for turning away Jewish refugees?

Do you think that the US was justified in not allowing more Jewish

immigrants to immigrate?

Jewish mother and son being rounded up by NazisHitler ordered the "Final Solution"--the extermination of Europe's Jews--soon after the United States entered the war. In this picture, German troops arrest residents of the Warsaw ghetto for deportation to concentration camps. Few would survive the camps where over six million Jews died. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

Jewish mother and son being rounded up by Nazis

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What do you notice about the locations of death camps and concentration camps?

How do you explain the difference?

Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945When the British liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hanover, Germany, in April of 1945, they found this mass grave. It held the remains of thousands of Holocaust victims who had been starved, gassed, and machine-gunned by their Nazi jailers. This photograph and many others provide irrefutable proof of the Holocaust's savagery. (Imperial War Museum)

Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945

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The Holocaust

CAUSES EFFECTS

What lessons should we learn from the Holocaust?

Could it ever happen again?

SOVIET WAR CRIMES:KATYN MASSACRE

"In favor," wrote Soviet leader Josef Stalin in thick blue pencil on secret police chief Lavrenti Beria's March 5, 1940, note condemning to execution without trial 24,700 Polish officers, gendarmes, officials and landlords captured by the Red Army in September 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland. The secret document was also signed by other members of the Communist Party Central Committe's Politburo. In April and May 1940, at different locations across the western flank of the Soviet Union, 21,857 Poles were executed and buried at secret locations in the woods.SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 5/20/9