Research Paper Holocaust Overview

Justin Garrett

Eng. 102-102 Mr. Neuberger 18 November 2011

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It all began in the 1930s when the Germans appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany. Once appointed chancellor, he perpetrated one of the most horrible genocides of all time. Hitler hated Jews, so he had all the ones the Nazis could find physically fit enough to work in concentration camps to support the war effort, while all other Jews were being exterminated. The mind-boggling, systematic way the Nazis murdered over eleven million people in less than three years remains important for one to understand so that history may not repeat itself. Rise of the Nazi Party and Anti-Semitism There are many theories why Hitler would hate the Jews. No one has a definite answer as to why he truly hated them. Many people say that his hatred for the Jews was because of Christianity, saying that, One can see in the Bible the statement that the Jews demanded the death of Jesus, and said, let it be upon our heads and that of our children (Wikipedia). Many people used that as their excuse to abuse the Jews. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) the hatred of or prejudice against the Jews is known as antiSemitism (USHMM). Another theory for why Hitler despised the Jews as much as he did was because the Jews got the blame for the German defeat in World War 1 (Wikipedia). Because the Jews got the blame for the Germans defeat, Hitler hated them. No one knows the actual reasoning for why Hitler truly hated the Jews, although his hatred toward them was a lot of the reason for many deaths among the Jews. Rise of the Nazi Party http://bit.ly/s9pW7W Although, not only did Hitler hate the Jews, but the hatred came from all the Nazis as well. The Nuremburg Laws

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At the annual party rally held in Nuremberg in 1935, the Nazis announced new laws which institutionalized many of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology (USHMM). According to USHMM, the Nuremberg Laws prohibited the Jews from Reich citizenship and also made it a law to where Jews could not have sexual relations with anybody that was German or had a related blood. The Nuremberg Laws, as they became known, did not define a Jew as someone with particular religious beliefs. Instead, anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was defined as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community (USHMM). Although, many of these Jews didnt practice the religion at all or have anything to do with it, they were still classified as one. For some time, before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, all the Nazis were demanded to remove signs saying Jews unwelcome. If people would have seen the signs the Games would have been transferred to another country. According to USHMM this would have caused a big hit to the German Prestige (USHMM). Kristallnacht According to American Experience the night of the Kristallnacht, 9 November, 1938, the Germans set fire to 7,000 businesses that were owned by the Jews, 900 synagogues and killed 91 Jews and sent more than 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps (American Express). All the Germans were encouraged to do these things. All the Jews were being ridiculed, they would put them in a stream and spit at them and throw things. Olympic Torch 1936 http://bit.ly/w3lKqt

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Kristallnacht was also known as a Night of the Broken Glass. According to Yad Vasham, this night, known as this because that night was the night that all the glass on Jewish businesses was broken out by the rioters. That night was the anniversary night that Hitler failed trying to take over Balvaria. The aryanization process of seizing Jewish property was intensified; the Jewish community was Kristallnacht http://bit.ly/rFAHmy forced to pay a fine of one billion reichsmarks, ostensibly as a payback for the death of vom Rath: and the Germans set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zenstralstelle fuer Juedische Auswanderung) to encourage the Jews to leave the country. All of this was to be considered as payback for the death of von Rath (Yad Vasham). Rounding Up Jews - Ghettos Ghettos were where the Jews were ordered to be sent to by the Germans. Ghettos had barbed wire surrounding the inner cities that Jews had to live in, in order to keep them from trying to escape and so people know that those areas were for the Jews and to also help keep the Jews inside their confined area. During World War II, ghettos were city districts (often enclosed) in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions (USHMM). Ghettos had the design to keep Jews in an area to where they could be sent there and be treated badly. Everything of any value was stripped from them and they were sent to live in very small uncomfortable places.

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The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone (USHMM). This was meant for segregation to the nonWarsaw Ghetto http://bit.ly/vRLJRB

Jewish population as well. This was all a plan to get rid of all the Jews by reaching their final solution, a mass murder. Although most ghettos did not last very long a few of the ghettos would last

months and some of them even lasted for years. The Final Solution The Final Solution was their way of getting rid of all the Jews. On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (USHMM). The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder (USHMM). The plan to implement the final solution was something
The Final Solution http://bit.ly/ry07K2

that was completed in multiple steps. They had to carefully plan that process to get it to work the way the Germans had wanted it.

After the Nazi party achieved power in Germany in 1933, its state-sponsored racism produced anti-Jewish legislation, economic boycotts, and the violence of the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom, all of which aimed to systematically isolate Jews from society and drive them out of the country (USHMM). In order for the final solution to work out the way they

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wanted it to, they had to first establish ghettos and round up the Jews so they could then start discriminating them. Selection At the Auschwitz complex of camps, some newly arrived Jews were selected for work and the rest were usually gassed as soon as possible. Selection in this sense only took place on a large scale at camps that were both extermination camps and labour camps - namely Auschwitz and Majdanek (Wiki). If one were selected, they would have been considered a lucky one. Obviously, the Jews got sent to these places so that they would be put to work, but at least the Jew would not be put to death just yet. The selection process was a devastating time for many of these Jews. Families would be separated, one part of one family would be selected and the other would be sent to a gas chamber. This is where most families either lost family member or would be separated for good. People would never know if they were going to see their families again, if they had enough food to eat, or if they had become to weak to work. Extermination Methods Selection for Gas Chamber http://bit.ly/fjESgF

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Sadly, there were many ways the Germans went about killing off the Jews. The use of gas chambers was the most common method of mass murdering the Jews in the extermination camps. The Jews were herded into the gas chambers, then the camp personnel closed the doors, and either exhaust gas (in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka) or poison gas in the form of Zyclon B or A (in Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau) was led into the gas chamber (Holocaust Education). Auschwitz was a leading Gas Chamber http://bit.ly/hf5cUE extermination camp. Just in Auschwitz alone they killed over one million Jews. They got it down to so much of an art that

they could kill over one thousand people an hour. The Germans would also dig a big ditch and line the Jews up along the edge and start shooting. As they would shoot the Jews they would fall back into the ditch and they would no longer have to worry about messing with the Jews. The only reason that this process did not last too long was because killing people all day long seeing you destroy peoples families and ending the lives of children was too hard on the Germans that were behind the guns. The Death Camps By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed. The number of children killed during the Holocaust is not fathomable and full statistics for the tragic fate of children who died will never be known. Estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children (Death Camps). Auschwitz http://bit.ly/9J4tFA

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Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps built primarily or exclusively for mass murder (USHMM). Of those 20,000 camps that were created to facilitate the Jews, six of those camps were death camps and out of those six over six million people were exterminated according to death camps. Liberation On June 6, 1944 (known as D-Day), the western Allies launched the single largest amphibious invasion force in world history, landing almost 150,000 soldiers under the command of U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower on the beaches of Normandy, France (USHMM). Many of the people that were in the concentration camps that the soldiers passed were starving and had diseases. Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies of murdered prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were left standing (USHMM). Unfortunately the soldiers were not able to reach Liberation http://bit.ly/sqYMYg there in time. By 1943, most of the Jews that were going through the concentration camps were murdered. According to USHMM by 1945 the largest of all concentration camps was shut down. There was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Soviets found

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personal belongings of the victims. They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair (USHMM). After Liberation On May 8, 1945, less than one year after D-Day, Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender became official, and the world could celebrate the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule (USHMM). Once all the Jews were out of the concentration camps, they were not sure how to handle it. Many of the people that had just gotten out of the camps over ate. This ended up killing many Jews. It was a very hard transformation, going from not having hardly any food, fighting over a piece of bread, to having plenty of food. Going from having what they needed to survive and all the normal necessities to not having anything, being stripped of all their belonging, nutrition, and many of them their families, it was a very hard thing to go back to having their own lives and not living in camps or ghettos, working to know that their lives might end at any time, whether it was by lack of nutrition or being in a gas chamber. It is nearly impossible for one to imagine how hard it must have been for a Jew going through the Holocaust. Having the chance to rebuild the lives that they once had was impossible for many Jews. During the initial period following liberation, a great number of the survivors attempted to return to their original homes and communities. The vast majority, however, could not find any survivors from their families, and some even encountered manifestations of hostility and violence. Most survivors sought to leave Europe and build new lives elsewhere (Yad Vasham). The lives of all the Jews would never be the same again. Most of them never got over all events San Dizier after Liberation http://bit.ly/w2tGZL

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that happened, seeing their families die and being put through all the traumatizing events that they were put through. Many people neglect that the events ever even occurred. Most Nazis dont want to live up to what had happened so they try to forget that it even happened. The Holocaust was a very tragic event and the absence of it happening again would be a great reason as why people dont want to forget what had happened. Works Cited

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. "Yad Vashem Kristallnacht." Yad Vasham. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. "Why Did Hitler and the Nazis Hate the Jews." The Q&A Wiki. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. "The American Experience.America and the Holocaust.People & Events | "Kristallnacht" | PBS." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. "Extermination Camps." The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. "Death Camps." Gates To Hell - The Nazi Death Camps. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.