Oscar Schindler

Facts: Oscar Schindler Womanizer, alcoholic, bad businessman,

adulterer and German spy. Had two children out of wed lock, with whom he

had no relationship. Saved 1,098 Jews during the holocaust. Spent his personal fortune to keep them alive with

food purchased on the black market. Pawned the gold ring the Jews gave him after the

war. They gave him a replacement.

Schindler's factory at Kraków in 2006

Office workers from the “Emalia” factory.

Schindler’s gravestone

The Holocaust

The signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews."

Holocaust Greek word for burned. Defined as a sacrifice consumed by fire. Anti-Semitism

Hatred against the Jews.

Hitler institutes the Nuremberg Laws Jews stripped of German citizenship No civil or economic rights

The Final Solution

"Selection" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers.

The joy at the end of the war in Europe was overshadowed by stories of German Concentration Camps.

Auschwitz Treblinka Jasenovac Belzec Majdanek Chelmno Sobibor

1.4 Million 870,000 600,000 600,000 360,000 320,000 250,000

Genocide The systematic killing of a whole national or

ethnic group. Genocide was coined by a historian after

World War II. The word comes from the Greek root geno,

meaning race, and cide, meaning to kill.

German policemen tormenting a Jew in Rzeszow, Poland.

A man is about to be shot sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth.The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa".

Two Procedures for Killing the Jews 1.) Killing Centers

Transformed factories into extermination centers for physically and mentally disabled.

Code named Aktion T4 1st focused on newborns and very young children Wives/Doctors registered children up to age 3

who showed signs of mental retardation and physical deformity.

Death was by 3 doctor’s based on questionnaire. No examination.

2.) Concentration Camps Stripped, forced into special chambers, and

gassed. Bodies burned in specially constructed ovens. 6.5 million killed

April 12, 1945: Lager Nordhausen, where 20,000 inmates are believed to have died.

A child dying in the streets of the crowded Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and disease killed 43,000 in 1941 alone.

Experiments How long could a person live without

oxygen. Placed in tanks of ice for 3 + hours. Cut off body parts to see if they could re-

attach it. Freezing, castration and starvation.

"Cold water immersion experiment at Dachau concentration camp presided over by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr Rascher (right).

Romanian children in Auschwitz, victims of medical experiments.

Children of the Holocaust

Zyklon B Pelets dropped into shower stales. Death within 15 minutes.

Buchenwald, 1945. Wiesel is on the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left.

Escorted by American soldiers, a large transport of children survivors of Buchenwald file out of the main gate of the camp, April 27, 1945. They are being taken to homes and medical centers in France. Eli Wiesel appears as the fourth child in the left column.

Starving prisoners in Mauthausen camp, Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the U.S. 80th Infantry Division on May 5, 1945.

Corpses in Auschwitz

Human remains found in the Dachau concentration camp crematorium after liberation. Germany, April 1945.

Dr. Fritz Klein, a former camp doctor who conducted medical experiments on prisoners, stands among corpses in a mass grave.

The valuables displayed here were confiscated from prisoners by German guards at the Buchenwald concentration camp and later found by American forces after the liberation of the camp. Buchenwald, Germany, after April 1945.

A U.S. solider surveys a German concentration camp It is a matter of history that

when Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead

 He did this because he said in words to this effect: 'Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some b*****d will get up and say that this never happened'

'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing' Edmund Burke 

American Response Limited immigration – due to lack of jobs Thought reports on Final Solution were

untrue. Focus was elsewhere