The Holocaust

Chapter 16

Section 3

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.

The Survivors

• Some six million European Jews died in the death camps and massacres.

• Less than four million survived.

• Some escaped with the help of non-Jewish people.

• Regardless, those that experienced the Holocaust were forever changed.