Created by:Jonathan Lapp

The HolocaustThe HolocaustElie Elie

WieselWiesel

Elie WieselElie Wiesel Elie Wiesel was born in 1928

in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945.

As a 15 year-old boy Elie was separated from his mother and sister immediately on arrival in Auschwitz. He never saw them again. He managed to remain with his father for the next year as they were worked almost to death, starved, beaten, and shuttled from camp to camp on foot, or in open cattle cars, in driving snow, without food, proper shoes, or clothing. In the last months of the war, Elie's father succumbed to dysentery, starvation, exhaustion and exposure.

Adolf Hitler

Hitler reserved the brunt of his vituperation for the Jews, whom he portrayed as responsible for all of the problems and evils of the world, particularly democracy, Communism, and internationalism, as well as Germany's defeat in the War. Jews were the German nation's true enemy. they were not a race, but an anti-race.

According to Hitler the German people were of the highest racial purity and those destined to be the master race. To maintain that purity, it was necessary to avoid intermarriage with subhuman races such as Jews and Slavs. Germany could stop the Jews from conquering the world only by eliminating them. By doing so, Germany could also find Lebensraum, living space, without which the superior German culture would decay. This living space, Hitler continued, would come from conquering Russia, which was under the control of Jewish Marxists, he believed, and the Slavic countries.

The Final SolutionThe Final Solution What is clear is that the genocide of the Jews was the culmination

of a decade of Nazi policy, under the rule of Adolf Hitler. The "Final Solution" was implemented in stages.

After the June 1933 Nazi party rise to power, state-enforced racism resulted in anti-Jewish legislation, boycotts, "Aryanization," and finally the "Night of Broken Glass" pogrom, all of which aimed to remove the Jews from German society.

After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the Nazis began the systematic deportation of Jews from all over Europe to six extermination camps established in former Polish territory -- Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek.

Extermination camps were killing centers designed to carry out genocide. Over three million Jews were gassed in extermination camps. In its entirety, the "Final Solution" consisted of gassings, shootings, random acts of terror, disease, and starvation that accounted for the deaths of about six million Jews -- two-thirds of all European Jews.

Oskar Schindler• He outwitted Hitler and the

Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than anyone else during World War II.

•For more than 1200 Jews, Oscar Schindler was all that stood between them and death at the hands of the Nazis.•Today there are more than

7,000 descendants of the Schindler-Jews living in US and Europe, many in Israel. Before the Second World War, the Jewish population of Poland was 3.5 million. Today there are between 3,000 and 4,000 left.

•Oscar Schindler spent millions to protect and save his Jews, everything he possessed. He died penniless.

Count One: Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War

This count helped address the crimes committed before the war began, showing a plan to commit crimes during the war.

Count Two: Waging Aggressive War, or "Crimes Against Peace“

Including “the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances.”

Count Three: War Crimes

These were the more traditional” violations of the law of war including treatment of prisoners of war, slave labor, and the use of outlawed weapons.

Count Four: Crimes Against Humanity

This count involved the actions in concentration camps and other death rampages.

Indictments at the Indictments at the Nuremberg TrialsNuremberg Trials

Nuremberg Trial Results

• 22 people were tried• 3 defendants were found not guilty• 12 were sentenced to death by

hanging• 1was sentenced to 10 years in prison

•1 was sentenced to 15 years in prison•2 were sentenced to 20 years in prison•3 were sentenced to life in prison•2 committed suicide before punishment was given

• Key elements of this belief are the explicit or implicit rejection – that the Nazi government had a policy of

deliberately targeting Jews and people of Jewish ancestry for extermination as a people

– that between five and seven million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies

– and that tools of mass extermination such as gas chambers were used in extermination camps to kill Jews

• Holocaust denial is the belief that the genocide of the Jews and other minority groups during World War II either did not occur, or did not occur to the extent described by current scholarship

After the war, the teenaged Wiesel found asylum in France, where he learned for the first time that his two older sisters had survived the war. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In 1985 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom and, in 1986, the Nobel Prize for Peace.