The Holocaust

Table of Contents

• Definitions• Different stages of the

Holocaust • Answers to Frequent

Questions• Bringing the Nazis to

justice

Holocaust Defined

• "Holocaust" is a Greek word meaning "sacrifice by fire."

Anti-Semitism Defined

• Prejudice or hatred against Jews

• Increases during times of crisis (Great Depression 1930’s)

• During hard times, people look to find scapegoats

• Jewish people, because they are an isolated minority, become popular targets The sign reads "Jews are not

wanted here."

The Holocaust

• 1933-1945• Nazi Germany’s systematic

persecution and annihilation of European Jews

• 6 million Jews murdered & 5 million non-Jews – Gypsies– Handicapped– Poles– Homosexuals– Jehovah’s Witnesses– Free Masons – Soviet prisoners of war

Why People Hate The Jews?

• Christians blame the Jews for killing Jesus

• Jewish communities kept to themselves & didn’t allow intermarriages

• Catholic church had laws against lending $ at interest – Jews made a living out of money

lending → no one likes people they’re indebted to

Why He Hated Them?

• Hitler picked up his anti-Semitism while he was in Vienna

• He became friends with the mayor, Karl Lueger, who was an anti-Semite

• Anti-Semitic propaganda was rampant in Vienna at the time

Hardship In Vienna

• Hitler lived there 1907-1913 • Most difficult years of his life• Twice rejected from Vienna

Academy of Fine Arts• 2nd rejection most traumatic

experience in his life – his dreams were shattered

Mein Kampf

• “To me, Vienna, the city which, to so many, is…a festive playground for merrymakers…I am sorry to say, merely the living memory of the saddest period of my life…Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first as a day laborer, then as a small painter…the uncertainty of earning daily bread soon seemed to me one of the darkest sides of my new life.”

Another Quote

• “Gradually, I began to hate them…for me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through, I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti-Semite”

Other Theories

• Jealousy – some Jews were successful and held powerful positions in Austria and Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s

• Many were suffering during the Great Depression

• Successful Jews were envied and blamed for “taking German jobs”

Final Diagnosis

• In Anti-Semitism, Hitler found an explanation for his failures and sufferings – the Jews

• The Jews were the single cause of his unhappiness and humiliation – they were the source of all evil in the world

• Hitler found his purpose in life – cleansing the German race of the Jews

His Thoughts 1922

“If I am ever in power, the destruction of the Jews will be my first and most important job. As soon as I have the power, I shall have gallows after gallows erected. Then Jews will be hanged one after another and will stay hanging until they stink.”

Jews In Germany

• 525,000 (64 million Germans)• Less than 1% of total

population • Jews, Gypsies and the

handicapped were seen as a serious biological threat to the purity of the German Aryan race

• Jews blamed for Germany’s economic depression and its defeat in World War 1

The Eternal Jew Movie

Anti-Semitism Everywhere

More Anti-Semitism

Caption: "Then and Now.“

• The cartoon shows a Jew stealing a farm before the Nazi takeover, but afterwards he is stopped by the law. (16 January 1934)

Education In Nazi Germany

• Two Jewish students are humiliated in front of their whole class. The writing on the board proclaims “the Jew is our greatest enemy! Beware of the Jew!"

The Nazi Curriculum

• Individual learning was discouraged

• Racial biology and eugenics

• Celebrate German history• Discipline, duty,

obedience, courage• Physical training—Body

over mind

An Example

• “The Jewish Nose is Wide at the End and Looks like the Number Six”

Task of the Teacher

• Strengthen the soul and spirit of youth

• Instill nationalism in younger generation

• Prepare students for service, and even self-sacrifice to German

Raising Anti-Semitic Children

• How a German Peasant was Driven from House and Farm

"Daddy, someday when I have my own farm, no Jew will enter my house..."

Raising Kids To Hate

• How Jewish Traders Cheat"Farming woman, have I got something special for you today. Look at this material! You can make a dress from it that will make you look like a baroness, like a countess, like a queen”

Raising Anti-Semitic Children• "We don't care about Germany... The

main thing is that things go well for us..."

• "Here, kids, I have some candy for you. But you both have to come with me..."

A Child’s Story

• “The Poisonous Mushroom”• This story is from a Nazi

children's book designed to teach hatred of Jews

• Written by Julius Streicher, who specialized in anti-Semitic propaganda

• Executed for his role in the Holocaust

The Poisonous Mushroom

• A mother and her young boy are gathering mushrooms in the German forest. The boy finds some poisonous ones. The mother explains that there are good mushrooms and poisonous ones, and, as they go home, says:

"Look, Franz, human beings in this world are like the mushrooms in the forest. There are good mushrooms and there are good people. There are poisonous, bad mushrooms and there are bad people. And we have to be on our guard against bad people just as we have to be on guard against poisonous mushrooms. Do you understand that?"

Continued

"Yes, mother," Franz replies. "I understand that in dealing with bad people trouble may arise, just as when one eats a poisonous mushroom. One may even die!"

"And do you know, too, who these bad men are, these poisonous mushrooms of mankind?" the mother continued.

Franz slaps his chest in pride: "Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews! Our teacher has often told us about them."

The mother praises her boy for his intelligence, and goes on to explain the different kinds of "poisonous" Jews: the Jewish pedlar, the Jewish cattle-dealer, the Kosher butcher, the Jewish doctor, the baptised Jew, and so on.

Continued

"However they disguise themselves, or however friendly they try to be, affirming a thousand times their good intentions to us, one must not believe them. Jews they are and Jews they remain. For our Volk they are poison."

"Like the poisonous mushroom!" says Franz.

"Yes, my child! Just as a single poisonous mushrooms can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk."

Franz has understood.

Continued

"Tell me, mother, do all non-Jews know that the Jew is as dangerous as a poisonous mushroom?“

Mother shakes her head.

"Unfortunately not, my child. There are millions of non-Jews who do not yet know the Jews. So we have to enlighten people and warn them against the Jews. Our young people, too, must be warned. Our boys and girls must learn to know the Jew. They must learn that the Jew is the most dangerous poison-mushroom in existence. Just as poisonous mushrooms spring up everywhere, so the Jew is found in every country in the world. Just as poisonous mushrooms often lead to the most dreadful calamity, so the Jew is the cause of misery and distress, illness and death."

The End

The author then concludes this story by pointing the moral:

German youth must learn to recognise the Jewish Poison-mushroom. They must learn what a danger the Jew is for the German Volk and for the whole world. They must learn that the Jewish problem involves the destiny of us all.

"The following tales tell the truth about the Jewish poison-mushroom. They show the many shapes the Jew assumes. They show the depravity and baseness of the Jewish race. They show the Jew for what he really is: The Devil in human form."

The Master Race

• Nazi scientists promoted “selective breeding” to improve the human race

• 1933-1935 – laws passed to reduce the future number of genetically “inferior” people

• 320,000 – 350,000 mentally & physically handicapped sterilized

• Taking care of them was seen as a burden to Germany

Master Race Propaganda

• (left) Billboard showing the different stages of growth for members of the Nordic race

• (right) A racial hygienist with calipers measuring the forehead of a young man

Stage 1

• Social discrimination– 1935 – Nuremberg laws made

Jews 2nd class citizens – 1937-1939 – Jews banned from

schools, restaurants, vacation spots and certain sections of German cities

• Law For The Protection of German Blood & Honor – No sexual relations or marriage

between Jews and persons of German blood "Jews are not wanted here.”

Social Discrimination

A woman who is concealing her face sits on a park bench marked "Only for Jews."

Social Discrimination

• German-Jewish couple with a “J” for Jude stamped on their passport

• An Austrian Nazi forces a young man to paint Jude on his father’s store

Restricted Relationships

• Germans forbidden from having relations with non-Germans, especially Jews

• Public humiliation of those who did have relations

• Businessman Oskar Danker is forced to wear a sign that says he is a Jew who takes German girls to his room

• The girl's placard says she is fit only for swine and so mixes with Jews

Stage 1 Continued

• Economic discrimination– 1933 – Jews forced out of

government, university, law , medical and school positions

– Jewish businesses boycotted

– Jewish businesses and property were seized or they were forced to sell at bargain prices

“Don’t buy from Jews”

Economic Discrimination

(left) "Germans! Defend Yourselves! Do Not Buy From Jews!“

(right) Jewish businessmen forced to carry signs that say “Don’t buy from Jewish shops! Buy from German businesses”

Economic Discrimination

(left) Nazi Storm Troopers stand guard outside a Jewish-owned business. Graffiti painted on the window states: "You Jewish pig may your hands rot off!"

(right) SA troops riding in a truck with the sign “Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews”

Kristallnacht

• 1938 - Night of the Broken Glass

• 7,000 Jewish businesses, 1,000 synagogues and homes were destroyed by Nazi thugs

• 91 Jews were murdered • 30,000 Jewish men arrested

and imprisoned • Business owners were

ordered by the Nazi government to pay for damages

Pictures from Kristallnacht

An Eyewitness

“The street in front of the building was full of SA people. In a moment they were upstairs and had forced the hall door…they forced their way into our apartment with a chorus of ‘Down with the Jews!’. They pulled sledgehammers out of sacks, and in a moment breaking furniture cracked, and panes of glass in sideboards and windows smashed. Then the fellows threatened me with their clenched fists. One of them grabbed me and screamed at me to get downstairs. I was convinced I was about to be beaten to death…I saw that the street was covered with books, papers, documents and letters which had been thrown out of my window.”

- Dr. Max Eschenbacher, a rabbi in Dusseldorf

Jewish Response

• Mass emigration out of Germany

• United States, Palestine, other parts of Europe and South America

• Those left behind did not want to leave or could not obtain a visa, sponsors or $ for emigration

• U.S, Canada, Britain and France did not admit large number of Jewish refugees German Jews wait in an emigration office in

Berlin. On the wall is a map of South America and a sign about emigration to Palestine.

Jewish Emigration

• Jewish Emigration from Germany, 1933-1938Year Number of Emigrants Total

• 1933 37,000 37,000• 1934 23,000 60,000• 1935 21,000 81,000• 1936 25,000 106,000• 1937 23,000 129,000• 1938 (1st 6 mos.) 20,000 149,000

Accepting Jewish Refugees

• 1933-1945 – U.S accepted

+200,000 – Britain 70,000– Brazil 27,000– Canada – less than

5,000

Anti-Semitic Canada

• Rejected gifted scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs

• Reason – they wouldn’t make good farmers (Jewish farmers with lots of $ were also rejected)

Why Canada Didn’t Step Up?

• Canada had a high level of anti-semitism and allowing too many Jewish refugees would cause violence

• French and English Canadians opposed all immigration

Prime Minister King

“We must seek to keep Canada free from unrest and too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood”

Deputy Minister of Immigration

“Pressure on the part of the Jewish people has never been greater than it is now and I am glad to say…that it has never been so well controlled. Fewer Jews are coming in than ever before.”

-Frederick Blair

Welcome To America?

• June 1939 – Cuba & U.S refuse to accept more than 900 Jewish refugees

• All were aboard the ocean liner St. Louis

• It was forced to return to Europe

Great Danes

• 1943 – King Christian 10th of Denmark asked all citizens to wear the Star of David as a show of support to the Jews

• The Danes secretly moved all Danish Jews to neutral Sweden, allowing them to return to their homes after the war

Start Of War

• September 1939 –Germany invades Poland

• Poland would be new living space for German families

• 50,000 Aryan-looking Polish children kidnapped and sent to Germany for adoption

The Nazi Juggernaut • German forces occupy much of Europe

– Poland (3 million)– Denmark– Norway– Netherlands– Belgium– Luxembourg – France– Yugoslavia – Greece – Soviet Union (5 million)

• German army’s success = inherit more Jews → What do we do with them?

Stage 2

• Jews deported from all German occupied countries

• Sent to ghettoes• Ghettos were city districts in

which the Jewish population was forced to live in (often under miserable conditions)

• 800+ set up throughout eastern Europe

• Isolation from rest of population

Life In The Ghetto• A foot bridge connecting two parts of

the Warsaw ghetto (bottom)• Jewish children with their small soup

rations (left)

Ghetto Life

• Overcrowded• Chronic shortage of food →

starvation• Lack of medical supplies and

adequate clothing to deal with extreme cold

• Plumbing broke down• Human waste and garbage

thrown in the streets → epidemic outbreaks, high death rate amongst residents

Ghetto Life

• Nazis deliberately tried to starve ghetto residents by limiting what food they could buy

• Thriving black market• Food and weapons

smuggled into ghettos Jewish laborers build Warsaw

ghetto wall in Poland

A Slow Death

• People weakened by cold and hunger → easy victims for disease

• Thousands died from illness, starvation or cold

• Some killed themselves to escape the horror

• Every day, children became orphaned → lived on the streets & begged for food, most froze to death in the winter

Dying Children

Slaves

Residents of the ghettos were a source of forced labor for the German war effort

Barbed wireseparating aghetto from therest of KrakowPoland

Random Acts of Violence

• In the Warsaw ghetto, one guard took pleasure in walking through the streets and shooting babies in strollers

• Others enjoyed driving their trucks at high speeds into crowds of Jewish ghetto residents

• Unarmed Jews could do little to protect themselves

Survival

(left) Jews buying and selling on the ghetto streets(right) Child vendors in the Polish streets. Children had to be

resourceful to help their families survive.

Children In The Ghetto

• Small children in the Warsaw ghetto sometimes helped smuggle food to their families by crawling through narrow openings in the ghetto wall

• If caught, they would be severely punished

• Average of 5,000 – 6,000 dying each month

Deception

• As Jews boarded trains, they were told to label their belongings which would follow them to their destinations

• Train stations had fake train schedules and even the clock was fake

Leaving The Ghettos

• 100 or more people were packed into the boxcars

• Trips took a few hours to a few days

• Inside there were no seats or bathrooms

• The old, young and sick died along the way

Inside The Cattle Cars

“We suffered from thirst and cold; at every stop we clamoured for water, or even a handful of snow, but we rarely heard; the soldiers of the escort drove off anybody who tried to approach the convoy. Two young mothers, nursing their children, groaned night and day, begging for water…the hours of darkness were nightmares without end.”

The Conference

• January 20, 1942• 90 minute meeting in the

Wannsee district of Berlin• 15 high ranking Nazi party

leaders gather to coordinate how to carry out “the final solution to the Jewish question”

• “The final solution” was the code name for the deliberate, planned mass murder of all European Jews

How was the Final Solution going to be organised?

Women, children, the old & the sick

were to be sent for ‘special treatment.’

The young and fit would go through a process called

‘destruction through work.’

Shooting was too inefficient as the

bullets were needed for the war effort

Jews were to be rounded up and put into transit camps called Ghettoes

The Jews living in these Ghettos were

to be used as a cheap source of

labour.

Conditions in the Ghettos were designed to be so bad that

many die whilst the rest would be willing to leave these areas in the hope of better conditions

The remaining Jews were to be

shipped to ‘resettlement areas’

in the East.

On arrival the Jews would go through a

process called ‘selection.’

How It Would Work

Reinhard Heydrich

• Head of the Gestapo• Organized the killing squads in

the Soviet Union • Chaired the Wannsee

Conference • Shot by members of the

Czech resistance in 1942• The Nazis honored him by

naming the destruction of Jews in Poland “Operation Reinhard”

Stage 3 • 4 Mobile firing squads (each

with 400-900 men) used extensively in the Soviet Union

• Einsatzgruppen followed advancing German army

• Made up of SS soldiers and criminals

One Einsatzgruppe detachment massacred

33,771 Jews near Kiev in just 1 day

Execution Methods

• They shot Jewish men, women, and children and buried them in mass graves (age didn’t matter)

• Often with the help of local informants and interpreters, Jews in an area were identified and transported to the execution site, where trenches had been prepared

• Sometimes they dug their own graves• After they handed over their valuables and undressed,

men, women, and children were shot, either “military style,” standing before the open trench, or lying face down in the prepared pit, in a manner that came to be known as “sardine packing.”

The Einsatzgruppen

(left) Jewish civilians arrive in a ravine just before they are executed in the Soviet Union

(right) A group of children just before their execution by the Einsatzgruppen

Mass Murders

(left) Members of a mobile killing squad before shooting a Jewish youth. The boy's murdered family lies in front of him. (right) Eisatzgruppen soldiers sift through the possessions of Jews who were just executed

Witness To Shootings In Ukraine

A German civilian, Hermann Graebe, witnessed the mass murder of Jews in the Ukraine by the SS and Ukrainian militia. He saw Jews taken in trucks from the town of Dubno to a killing ground.

“The people who got off the truck – men, women, and children of all ages –had to undress under the orders of the an SS man, who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and underclothing. Without screaming or weeping, these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells…”

Graebe then watched as the Jews were made to climb down into a large pit that was already half full of bodies. Standing or lying on the corpses, they were shot by an SS man with a machine gun.

Einsatzgruppen Activities

Stage 4

• Mobile gas vans • Airtight in the back• Pumped carbon

monoxide gas to suffocate human cargo in the sealed cabin at the back

• Resembled an ambulance or refrigerator truck

Van Details

• Resembled an ambulance or refrigerator truck

• The gassing took 15-30 minutes

• Van drove from the loading site to prepared graves

• Small vans held 80-100 people

• Larger vans held 130-150 people

Camp Differences

• Concentration camps held Jews, Gypsies, political and religious opponents, homosexuals and other Germans considered “enemies of the state”

• Those in concentration camps performed labor

• They died by starvation, disease and maltreatment

• Death camps were extermination camps where people were murdered in assembly-line style

Concentration Camps

(left) Prisoners dig ditches to install centralheating pipes

(right) Women used as forced labor

Stage 5

• 6 death camps• Close to railway lines • Set up in semi-rural areas • Supervised by SS troops

Death Camps Camps

• Death camps located in Poland– Belzec – Sobibor – Treblinka– Majdanek– Chelmno – Auschwitz-Birkenau

• Concentration camps were located in Germany

The Camps

Camp Procedures • Arrival & Selection• Men separated from women & children• Quickly sorted visually by Nazi doctors

– Death – left (90%) / Right – life (10%)

• Young & healthy used as forced labor• Remove a sense of identity• Shaved off hair

– Socks for Navy, stuffing for pillows, waterproof ropes for Navy

• Registration number tattooed on left forearm

• Undress & hand over valuables

How One Person Felt

“The shaving off of our hair was the most traumatic experience. It made me feel utterly vulnerable and reduced to a complete nobody. I had relinquished my clothes as well, and I stood there stark naked, bald, and with a number on my arm. In the space of a few minutes, I had been stripped of every vestige of human dignity and become indistinguishable from everyone around me.”

- Anit Lasker-Wallfisch (Holocaust survivor)

Procedures• Children, pregnant women, elderly, handicapped and

the sick sent to die• Undress and enter shower rooms• 200 capacity • Show room doors locked • Carbon monoxide (1/2 hour)• Zyklon B (insecticide) used to suffocate (10-15

minutes)• Processed 3,800 at one time• 1 day = 15,000• The Sonderkommando

• Remove bodies • Gold teeth • Ovens (20 minutes to burn 2-3 bodies, ashes) • Identification disposed of – no trace left

The Showers

Another Survivor

“It was early evening when the train stopped and the doors opened. As I came off the train, I saw on the left huge chimneys belching forth thick, black smoke. There was a strange smell, like burning the feathers off a chicken before it was cooked. I didn’t know that the smoke and the smell were not from chickens. I didn’t know, until I found out later on, that I was smelling our own flesh, our own families burning.”

-Ernest Honig (Holocaust survivor)

Most Famous Death Camp

• Auschwitz was the largest camp

• Consisted of a series of both concentration & death camps

• More than 1 million people died there

• Had 4 large gas chambers, each capable of holding 2,000 people at one time

Facts About Auschwitz

• A sign over the entrance to the camp read “Arbeit Macht Frei”

• The storage warehouses located near the crematoriums were called “Canada” because the Poles believed it was a country of great riches

Life In Auschwitz

• Men wore ragged, stripped pants and jackets

• Women wore work dresses • Issued ill-fitting work shoes,

sometimes clogs• No change of clothing

Sleeping Quarters

• Barracks had no insulation from heat or cold

• No bathroom, only a bucket • Each barrack held 36

wooden bunk beds• Inmates squeezed in 5-6

across the wooden plank• Approx 500 lived in a

barrack

Unpredictable Brutality

The SS could do whatever they wanted. An Auschwitz survivor, Dunja Wasserstrom, witnessed one especially brutal attack by two SS men, named Boger and Draser. The victim is one of the very few children to live as a prisoner at Auschwitz.

“The child was standing next to a car with his apple and was enjoying himself. Suddenly, Boger went over the boy, grabbed his legs, and smashed his head against the wall. Then he calmly picked up the apple. And Draser told me to wipe ‘that’ off the wall.”

Forced to work 12 hours or more a day

Beatings At Camp Majdanek

“Beating and being beaten were taken for granted at Majdanek…anyone could beat an inmate and the more experienced inmates never questioned why. They knew that they were beaten merely because they happened to run into someone who wanted to beat them…the victim was expected to take his licks standing rigidly at attention. Attempts to avoid the blows, to cover one’s face or head, were treated as additional offences.”

-Majdanek camp survivor Alexander Donat

The Walking Dead

• Constant hunger • Food =

– watery soup made with rotten vegetables and little meat

– Few ounces of bread– A bit of margarine, tea or bitter drink

resembling coffee • Diarrhea was common• Those weakened by dehydration

and hunger contracted contagious diseases

• 15 – 40 of every 100 people in the labor camps died

Children In The Camps

• At Auschwitz, children were often killed upon arrival• Children born in the camp were generally killed on the spot• Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, the

SS guards were ordered to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits

Medical Experiments• Cruel medical experiments done at the

camps • Men, women and children were used as

subjects • Inmates were put into pressure chambers,

tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to various other traumas

• Experiments - find better medical treatments for German soldiers & airmen

• Many died during the experiments, others were killed after the research was over and their organs removed for further study

The Angel Of Death• Dr. Josef Mengele - Senior SS physician at

Auschwitz • One of many doctors who carried out

“selections” of new arrivals • Carried out cruel research on twins deported to

the camp • Disappeared after the war • 1979 - Died in a swimming accident, his body

was found in 1985 in Brazil

Mengele • When a mother did not want to

be separated from her thirteen-year-old daughter, and bit and scratched the face of the SS man who tried to force her to her assigned line, Mengele drew his gun and shot both the woman and the child

• As punishment, he sent to the gas chamber all people from that transport who had previously been selected for work, with the comment “Away with this shit!”

Mengele’s Experiments On Twins• Mengele placed 14 Gypsy twins polished marble dissection tables and

put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantaneously. Mengele began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies.

• Mengele supervised an operation by which 2 Gypsy children were sewn together to create Siamese twins. The hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been reconnected. Often Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color.

• Mengele's special pathology lab was located next to the crematorium. He made experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one twin to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. And injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, the removal of organs and limbs, incestuous impregnations.

550,000 killed

200,000 killed

750,000 killed

150,000 killed

1 million + killed

125,000 killed

Color CodesDifferent colored patchesrepresented different groups:

• Yellow – Jews (Star of David) Jewish. This symbol was used prior to the camps in the ghettos and when Jews were in the general population

• Pink – Homosexuals• Purple - Jehovah's Witnesses• Red - Political Prisoners• Green - Criminals

Clothing

Clothing

No Escape!

• Escape was almost impossible • Electrically charged barbed-wire

fences surrounded the camp• Guards, equipped with machine

guns and automatic rifles stood in watch towers

• Prisoners lives controlled by the guards

• Prisoners were mistreated by fellow inmates who were chosen to supervise the others in return for special favors by guards

Map of AuschwitzNew Arrivals

‘Destruction Through

Work’

Outside Of Gas Chambers

Notice the Ovens easy located near the Gas Chambers

Lifespan of Inmates

• Most survived only a few weeks or months

• Those too ill or too weak during “selection” was sent straight to the gas chambers

• Some committed suicide by throwing themselves against electric fence

• Many inmates were determined to stay alive

Working Them To Death

This photo was taken by the Nazis to show just how you could quite literally work the fat of the Jews by feeding them 200 calories a day

Working Them To Death

Same group of Jews 6 weeks later

Sick Entertainment

• Kurt Franz, an SS officer at Treblinka, staged boxing matches between Jews in which the contestants had to fight until one of them was dead

Music Amongst Death

• Jewish musicians were formed into bands to play tunes while other inmates marched to work or filed toward the gas chambers

• The music would help calm down the new arrivals to camp

Pictures Representing The Dead

• (left) The shoes of death camp victims

• (bottom) The suitcases of victims

Aerial View of Auschwitz

Notice how the Death camp is set out like a

factory complex

The Nazis used industrial methods to murder the Jews and process their

dead bodies

Heroes Of The Holocaust

• 1943 – Danish resistance rescued 7,200 of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews

• Smuggled via boats into neutral Sweden

Le Chambon-Sur-Lignon

• Protestant village in southern France that sheltered 5,000 Jews

• The town hid their Jews for 4 years

• The town educated the Jewish children

• Not one Jew that hid in the town was taken by the Nazis

• They were eventually taken to the Swiss border to safety

Nazi Efficiency

• 1933 - Jewish population of Europe stood at over 9 million

• During the Holocaust, nearly two out of every three European Jews were murdered as part of the "Final Solution"

Liberation Of Camps

Horrific Discoveries

• As Allied troops made their way through Poland and discovered the horrors of the death camps, word spread quickly

Gory Discovery

On The Run • “War criminals” were rounded up • Hitler commits suicide along with

many of his henchmen

1945 Nuremberg Trials

• 11 months • 1st war crimes trial ever • Lawyers & judges from Britain, France,

Soviet Union and U.S• Nazis were tried for

– crimes against peace (plan, prepare, starting a war)

– war crimes (murder, deportations)– crimes against humanity (murder

based on political, racial or religious grounds)

• All 21 Nazis plead not guilty• Common defence – “just following

orders” or “this court has no jurisdiction”

Disobeying Orders

Germans who took part in the slaughter of Jews often used the excuse that if they did not follow orders, they themselves would have been killed. Former SS officer, Albert Hartl, has said this is untrue. He described how a commander of a task force ordered to massacre Jews:

“disapproved of these mass shootings, and therefore had himself transferred as soon as possible from the command…as far as I know, no serious consequences resulted from this…concerning the lesser ranks, I also know of no instance in which refusal to take part in the shooting of Jews resulted in anyone being sent to a concentration camp or being sentenced to death.”

Nazi Defendants

• Hermann Goring (2nd in command)

• Rudolf Hess (3rd in command)

• Joachim von Ribbentrop (foreign minister)

• 13 - death by hanging • 7 - life in prison or 10-20

years• 3 – acquitted

You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

• Adolf Eichmann • Head of the Gestapo department

dealing with Jewish affairs• He organized the transportation

of Jews to the death camps• After the war, escaped to Latin

America• Captured in Argentina by Israeli

Nazi-hunters • Put on trial in Israel 1961• Convicted & executed 1962

Nuremberg Trial pictures

The Catholic Church

• During the Holocaust, the Catholic church was indifferent and did not openly speak out against what was happening

• Had Pope Pius XII spoke out, he could have influenced 400 million Catholics to help the Jews

• He did not speak out against Kristallnacht

• 1933 – he signed a concordat with Hitler allowing Catholics to practice freely in Germany

What Little He Did

• March 1939 – Pope Pius XII issued 3,000 visas to European Jews allowing them to flee persecution

• When asked to publicly condemn the death camps, Pope Pius XII refused, wanting to remain neutral

• He did however privately tell Catholic institutions to hide Jews

Origin of “Genocide”

• Created by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who moved to the U.S

• Greek word for race “genos”• Latin word for killing “cide”• First used to describe Nazi policies of

systematic murder of an entire group

% of Jews Exterminated1. Poland 88%2. Soviet Union 48%3. Romania 49%4. Czechoslovakia 83%5. Germany 83%6. Hungary 50%7. Lithuania 87%8. France 43%9. Holland 80%10. Latvia 89%11. Yugoslavia 87%12. Greece 80%13. Austria 67%14. Belgium 40%15. Italy 26%

Answers To 2 Common Questions

• Why didn’t the Jews all leave?

• Why didn’t the Jews fight back?

Why Didn’t They All Leave?

• German Jews were patriotic (10,000+ served in WW1)

• Jews in Germany lived there for centuries and were assimilated

• Measures taken against the Jews were done gradually – no one could predict what was coming

• Those who decided to leave had to find a country that would accept them

Why Didn’t They All Fight Back?

• Jews carried out resistance in every country the Nazis occupied

• They resisted in ghettos, concentration and death camps

• The Jews did not resist en masse…why?

• What the Nazis did to deter resistance:– Hope– Deception– Lack of information – Denial – Fear– German policy of collective responsibility

Famous Ghetto

• Warsaw is the capital of Poland

• 360,000 Jews lived there • July-September 1942 –

300,000 Jews are deported out of the Warsaw ghetto

• The remaining 60,000 knew their time was almost up

• They organize themselves and begin to fight back!

Going Down With A Fight• Organized military

resistance was broken, but individuals and small groups hid or fought the Germans for the following month, until May 16, 1943

• The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest, symbolically most important Jewish uprising

Fighting Back

One Jewish fighter, Zivia Lubetkin, described the resistance against the SS in the Warsaw ghetto.

“When the Germans came up to our posts and marched by and we threw those hand grenades and bombs, and saw German blood pouring over the streets of Warsaw, after we saw so much Jewish blood running in the streets of Warsaw before that, there was rejoicing. The tomorrow did not worry us. The rejoicing amongst the Jewish fighters was great and, see the wonder and the miracle, those German heroes retreated, afraid and terrorized from the Jewish bombs and hand grenades, home-made.”

The Nazis began burning the ghetto, building by building, to force the remaining Jews out of hiding

The Holocaust Through Art

• David Olère was born in Warsaw, Poland, on January 19, 1902.

• From March 2, 1943, to January 19, 1945. David Olère was interned at Auschwitz.

• The horrors he witnessed there are incomprehensible to anyone who did not personally experience the Holocaust.

• No photographs were taken at Auschwitz of what went on in the gas chambers and crematoria. Only the memories of Olère, reproduced as art in his drawings and paintings, give an account of the horrible reality

Remembering The Holocaust

• Holocaust museum Yad Vashem is located in Israel

• Preserves the memories of those who died and to honor the “righteous Gentiles” who helped save the lives of countless Jews

• 21,300 righteous Gentiles