Research Paper Holocaust Overview

Courtney Gaunt

Mr. Neuburger Eng. 102-127 18 October 2012

Gaunt 2 There have been many tragedies in human history, and many of them one learns about in school, some people are alive to experience them, and others are forgotten throughout generations. Today, there may not be a soul that does not know about the Holocaust. The Holocaust is one of the largest cases of genocide in human history. Though the Holocaust is a distasteful and depressing topic, it is important that people are educated about the Holocaust, and the events leading up to it so that mankind may learn from past mistakes. Nazi Rise to Power After Germany was defeated in World War 1 German leaders were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The article Treaty of Versailles, 1919 explains the treaty demanded Germany must be demilitarized, give up their territories, and except full responsibility for all material damage (USHMM.org). The consequences for World War 1 left Germany with damaged pride, and a poor economy, and political disarray. The website A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust conveys that shortly after the Weimar Republic was established the National Socialist German Worker`s
Nazi http://bit.ly/UsekeT Nazi Party Flag. Party Flag. Source: http://bit.ly/UsekeT

Party or Nazi Party was created, and Adolph Hitler

quickly became the leader of the political party (The Rise of the Nazi Party). Hitler became popular so quickly because he appealed to the German people with speeches of German pride, restoring power, and blaming European nations and Jews for the downfall of Germany. According to the article The Rise of the Nazi party, in 1929 President Hindenburg put the government`s emergency powers in effect which allowed a chancellor and cabinet members to assume power rather than pass laws. In the 1932 election Hitler won 37% of the vote, but

Gaunt 3 Hindenburg won the election (A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust). Hindenburg later named Hitler chancellor on the condition that Hitler the keep promises he made to Hindenburg. Nuremburg laws With Adolf Hitler as the new Chancellor, he was more influential than ever before. In Hitler`s powerful speeches he not only inspired German pride, but hatred as well. Hitler often held the Jewish people accountable for many national problems, and spoke of his beliefs of eugenics, saying that German blood must be kept pure. In a world where anti-Semitism was already prevalent, his beliefs had an impact on German people, and as anti-Semitism increased, so did open discrimination against Jews. The article the Nuremburg Laws describes many caccounts of civil unrest between Jewish and nonJewish citizens, and also the disagreement on what legal action should be taken to deal with the Jews (The History Place: The Triumph of Hitler). The web page The History Place: World War II in Europe, states that on September 15, 1935 Hitler
Instructional chart to distinguish Jews. Source: http://bit.ly/R22UzB

announced two new laws regarding the Jews in

Germany, the first one Defining who is considered a German citizen, and demoting Jews to subjects of the Reich, and the second forbidding sexual and marital interaction between Jews and German citizens (The Nuremburg Race Laws). These laws were the first of many to discriminate and segregate the Jewish people. Because there was confusion over who was considered a Jew, guidelines were addressed. According to the article The History Place: The Triumph of Hitler charts were published explaining that any person with three Jewish

Gaunt 4 grandparents were considered full-Jews, and a person with two or less Jewish grandparents were Mischlinge, or half-Jews (The Nuremburg Laws). Propaganda Propaganda played a very important role in the rise of the Nazi party, and the acceptance of Nazi beliefs. The primary goals of Nazi propaganda were to gain support from German people, and show that certain actions were necessary. The USHMM explains that shortly after Hitler came to power the established a Reich Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda, and named Joseph Goebbels as the departments head. Goebbels responsibility was to ensure that Nazi messages were communicated properly, and present in all forms of media including education materials, theatre, art, radio, books, and press (Nazi Propaganda). According to the web page Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team (HEART) one of the ideals promoted was the community of the people which promoted the idea of a peaceful communities, hard work, and law and order. However, the Nazi`s believed that this community was based on racial purity, and that it could not exist unless certain social types were not present in Germany (Nazi Propaganda). Promoting war was also very important to the Nazi agenda. The Nazi`s wanted the people to believe that the war was necessary. The article Nazi Propaganda reveals that during wartime labor production was very important, so to inspire German people to increase production, the Nazi`s produced propaganda that expressed
Propaganda depicting a Jew consuming other nations Source: http://bit.ly/W2wQvs

the importance of the peoples labor in defeating the Allies, saying

that You are the front!. The article also describes how the Nazi`s used propaganda to enforce racial stereotypes and dehumanize Jews. The article clarifies that the underlining purpose for

Gaunt 5 dehumanizing Jews was to prepare the German people for the final solution to make it easier for the people who might be sympathetic to Jews, or had Jewish friends in the past (Thinkquest). The HEART tells that the German youth were considered a very important audience, and describes the courses and textbooks offered to schools as reflecting the aims of Hitler. The HEART also tells that the teachers are required to treat racial theory as the most important subject (Nazi Propaganda). Nazi propaganda was very successful, and it achieved the goal of deceiving a nation, and promoting hatred. Kristallnacht Kristallnacht was a very important event leading up to the Holocaust, the word it`s self means the night of broken glass, but it describes a night of rioting and blatant violence against Jewish people. Open violence towards Jews was not encouraged or punished by the Nazi`s at this point, but a specific event gave the Nazi`s the perfect excuse to promote the events of Kristallnacht. The Jewish Virtual Library (JVL) explains that Herschel Grynszpan, a Jew living in Paris, learned his familys possessions had been seized, and that his family had been forced out of
Synagogue burned during Kristallnacht. Source: http://bit.ly/Tt7uoi

Germany. Herschel, enraged upon learning what

happened had made the decision to assassinate the German ambassador to France. The JVL goes on to explain that on November 7th 1938 Herschel`s plan to kill the ambassador had been faulty, and he instead made decision to assassinate a lesser German official. This action was what the Nazi leaders needed to justify promoting violent actions towards Jewish people (Kristallnacht). The article Kristallnacht expresses that on November 9th 1938, countless mobs throughout

Gaunt 6 Germany started to attack Jews, burn Jewish buildings, and destroy Jewish property. The article Kristallnacht also describes the result of the devastation saying that By the end of the rampage, gangs of Nazi storm troopers had destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses, set fire to more than 900 synagogues, killed 91 Jews and deported some 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps (PBS). Many laws had been passed before and after Kristallnacht that discriminate against Jews, but it was not until after Kristallnacht that violence, and removal of Jewish people was considered necessary, and acceptable. Rounding Up Jews- Ghettos After Kristallnacht the segregation of Jewish people from the rest of society was of the highest importance, and Jews were uprooted from their homes and placed in assigned communities to further isolate them from society. These communities were very small in comparison to the high population of Jewish people forced to live in them. The article Ghettos describes the population/area ratio by stating the largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw Ghetto, where more than 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles (USHMM). According to the USHMM the first ghetto was established in Piotrkw Trybunalski,
Jewish children living in a Ghetto. Source: http://bit.ly/REfVkf

Poland in October 1939, but the Nazis created over 1,000

ghettos in Germany, and German occupied countries. (Ghettos). The living conditions of the Jews in the ghettos were to no surprise inhuman, and volatile. Most of the Jews living in ghettos were starving. The article Ghettos under the Nazis exemplifies this by stating the Nazis determined that the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto could survive on an official food allocation of 300 calories per day (My Jewish Learning). The living conditions the Jews were

Gaunt 7 exposed to in the ghettos resulted in many deaths due to starvation, and outbreaks of Typhus. Many of the Ghettos had walls around them to provide further segregation and prevent escape. A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust describes the borders of the ghettos as made of many different materials, such as brick, stone and barbed wire with guards placed around the borders at all exit points (Ghettos). The Nazis implemented strict regulations for Jewish people to follow, MJL exemplifies this by stating the Nazis ordered Jews to wear identifying badges or armbands with a yellow Star of David on them in the ghettos (Ghettos under the Nazis). The armbands were another way for the Nazis to further segregate Jews from society, but it also made it easier for Nazis to carryout orders involving the Jews. Although the final solution was not decided when the ghettos were formed, placing the Jews in them made the Nazi extermination of Jews much more organized. Once the final solution was decided, the Nazis started to liquidate the ghettos. My Jewish Learning (MJL) describes the liquidation by stating with the implementation of the "Final Solution" in 1942, the Germans began to destroy the ghettos through deportation of the Jewish occupants to forced-labor and extermination camps (Ghettos under the Nazis). The Death Camps After the final solution was decided the Nazis then needed a place to carry out the extermination. The Nazis certainly couldnt carry out the order inside the ghettos, and it was important that the Jews did not know their fate. The Aish webpage writes they were told that they were going to different places, better conditions, work camps, on and on and on (The Trains). Throughout German occupied Poland the Nazis developed locations for the purpose of murdering Jews, referred to as death camps. However, not all the Jewish people were sent to death camps. The Jews that were not too young, too old, or too sick were sent to industrial factories and forced to do labor. According to the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide

Gaunt 8 Studies (DCHGS) there were a total of six extermination camps in rural Poland. The camps were conveniently located near railroads which made it much more practical fir the transportation of Jews to the camps. The DCHGS also tells that the six extermination camps: Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were all functional from December 1941, until December 1944 (Extermination Camps). In Just four years the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jewish people in the industrialized death camps they created. AuschwitzBirkenau is known to be the largest death camp because of the alarming amount of Jews that were murdered there. The DCHGS credits the effectiveness of Auschwitz-Birkenau to the advanced technology available, stating that elevators were used to take the bodies straight from the gas chambers, to the crematories (Extermination Camps). With most of the death camps located near a railroad, the Nazis used trains as a way to transport large masses of Jews to the labor and death camps. The Jews were packed into railway cars like cattle. The article The Trains describes the conditions of the train transports by writing there was no water. There was no food. There
Mass grave of a death camp Source: http://bit.ly/Rw5luj

was no toilet, no ventilation. Some boxcars had up to 150

people stuffed into them (Aish). The amount of time the Jews spent on the train varied, and some transports took days to reach their destination. Aish tells that the longest transport took 18 days, and when the train reached its destination, all the Jews inside the rail cars were already dead (The Trains). Although the death camps were not responsible for all of the deaths of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, the creation of the camps attributed to nearly half of the estimated total deaths.

Gaunt 9 Extermination Methods Once the question of what to do with the Jews was answered, the Nazis then had to formulate how they would carry out the orders. The Nazis had evolved their methods of murdering Jews many times. Many of the methods were discontinued because they were found to be impractical, or not efficient enough. In other words some methods used too many resources that the Nazis did not want to use, or they were somehow not meeting the death quota the Nazis decided was necessary. The article Extermination Camps conveys that the first method used to murder Jews was firing squads, but the Nazis stopped when they realized how much ammo would need to be used, and how negatively it affected the soldiers ordered to shoot them. After that the Nazis started to experiment with poison gas (Yad Vashem). According to Yad Vashem, the Clemno death camp used gas vans. The Nazis ordered Jews to enter vans which had
Auschwitz gas chamber Source: http://bit.ly/TWEXMh

the exhaust pipes manipulated to connect to the interior.

By the time the Jews arrived at the mass grave site, they were all dead from carbon monoxide poisoning (The Implementation of the Final Solution: The Death Camps). The use of gas chambers to murder the Jews was the most common extermination method because it allowed many Jews to die at once, and it did not require any Nazi soldiers to personally kill Jews. According to the DCHGS Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka used carbon monoxide from engines to Kill Jews, while Auschwitz-Birkenau used the gas produced by Zyclon B (Extermination Camps). The article The Killing Evolution refers to the use of Zyclon B by stating The most effective and efficient technique developed for killing at Auschwitz depended on the same pesticide that was used to kill the lice in prisoners' clothing. The article also explains how

Gaunt 10 Zyclon B worked. When the crystals of Zyclon be were exposed to heat, at a certain temperature the crystals would emit a poisonous gas. Auschwitz contained eight gas chambers and forty-six ovens that could dispose of about 4,400 corpses each day (PBS). The use of crematories was crucial to the Nazis because it allowed them to dispose of bodies much easier, but crematories also allowed them to eliminate evidence of the mass murders committed by the Nazis. Liberation According to an article titled Liberation, on June 22, 1944, allied troops from the U.S. and England began their invasion into German occupied France. Referred to most commonly as D-Day, this massive military invasion marked the turning point of the war and an end to the German war machine in the west. However, the article goes on to explain that to the Jewish people imprisoned in internment camps, this day was the start of what President Eisenhower called The Great Crusade. It marked the end of Nazi tyranny in Western Europe and the beginning of the race to free the Jewish people (USHMM). The article Liberation of the Concentration Camps explains that the camps were first discovered by American troops on April 4th, 1945. The camp was a recently abandoned labour camp at in Thuringia, Germany. The article also coveys that nine days later British troops liberated their first camp in Bergen-Belsen (BBC). This camp was where the true horrors of the Nazi crimes started to become very real. The BBC relays that upon the British discovery of camp Bergen-Belsen, German troops requested a truce so they could evacuate the 9,000 sick and dying inmates and then surrender the
Liberation of Bergen-Belsen Source : http://bit.ly/Uz5z8s

camp to the troops. However, when the camp was surrendered, so

too were the 70,000 Jewish victims; both living and dead. The BBC illustrates too that an

Gaunt 11 estimated 20,000 bodies were discovered lying unburied and naked inside the barracks, and there were another estimated 50,000 survivors found lying in their own filth throughout the camp (Liberation of the Concentration Camps). Bergen-Belsen was the last and largest camp to be discovered before the end of the war which marked the end of the Nazi crimes and the beginning of Jewish peoples recovery. The article Liberation of the Concentration Camps also describes the relief efforts taken by medical teams to get the people to a healthy condition by conveying that the prisoners who seemed to stand some chance of living were first washed and deloused, before being disinfected with DDT powder. Afterwards, doctors spent much of their time trying to rehydrate and feed their patients. However, even after all the effort over 13,000 inmates died after the liberation simply because they were too ill to be saved (BBC). One of the complications of liberation was burying the 20,000 corpses just lying around the camps. According to BBC, as punishment for their crimes, German troops were forced to carry the diseased bodies to mass grave without proper protection. Many of them caught typhus and died. This method proved to be too slow however, so the bodies were loaded onto bulldozers and shovelled into the graves. Finally, after the inmates had been freed from the camps, Belsen was burned to prevent the lice from spreading the typhus epidemic further (Liberation of the Concentration Camps). As the death camps were liberated, the magnitude of the Nazis crimes were discovered. Allied troops travelled throughout Germany and its occupied territories to liberate all of the death camps. The events of the Holocaust were horrifying, and gruesome. By the time the Jews were liberated, 12 million Jews had died from starvation, disease, or execution. To comprehend the reality of the crimes committed by the Nazis is seemingly impossible. But learning about the reality and events of the Holocaust is what makes people realize what mankind is capable of, and how important it is to prevent occurrences like the Holocaust at all costs.

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Works Cited Ellis, Eliyahu, and Shmuel Silinsky. "The Trains." Aish.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.aish.com/ho/o/48970811.html>. "Extermination Camps." The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.holocaust-education.dk/lejre/udryddelseslejre.asp>. "Extermination Camps." N.p., n.d. Web. Nov.-Dec. 2012. "Ghettos." United Stats Holocaust Memorial Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005059>. Glazer, Susan D. "Ghettos under the Nazis." My Jewish Learning. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Modern_History/19141948/The_Holocaust/War/Ghettos.shtml>. Hart, Stephen A. "Liberation of the Concentration Camps." BBC News. BBC, 17 Feb. 2011. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml>. "Holocaust Timeline: The Ghettos." A Teacher Guide to the Holocaust. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/timeline/ghettos.htm>. "The Holocaust." Yadvashem. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/05/death_camps.asp>.

Gaunt 13 "The Killing Evolution." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/4045/killing/>. "Kristallnacht." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX99.html>. "Liberation." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/liberation/>. "Nazi Propaanda." United States Hlocaust Memorial Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005274>. "Nazi Propaganda." Holocaust Education & Research Team. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/nazprop.html>. "Nazi Propaganda." ThinkQuest. Oracle Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/ww2/german/naziprop.htm>. "The Nuremberg Race Laws." The History Place. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/nurem-laws.htm>. "Treaty of Versailles, 1919." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005425>. "Triumph of Hitler: The Nuremberg Laws." The History Place. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-nurem-laws.htm>.