2. Holocaust Terms and Events

Kristallnacht“The Night of Broken Glass”

• In 1938 many Polish Jews living in Germany were rounded up and sent to a concentration camp, including the family of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17 year old Polish Jew living in Paris.

• Grynszpan went to the German Embassy in Paris and shot a German diplomat.

• In retaliation for this Jewish murder of a German diplomat, Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels gave the signal for a nationwide pogrom* against the Jews.

*Pogrom

• Pogroms originated in Russia. They were government sanctioned riots and vandalism against Jews and Jewish-owned property.

• On November 9 and 10, 1938, violence raged throughout Germany against Jews. Synagogues were set on fire, Jewish businesses were vandalized, many Jews were killed, and thousands were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

• Shattered glass littered the streets and created the name “Kristallnacht” or “Night of Broken Glass” to memorialize the event.

• This event marks the beginning of the Holocaust.

• The Jews were forced to pay the Nazis for the damages done to their own property for Kristallnacht!

• Three days after Kristallnacht the Nazis enacted policies that segregated Jews from going to theatres, parks, schools, plus prohibited them from owning and operating businesses. Jewish businesses were taken over by the Nazis.

Selection

• Selection means being chosen to continue living because you are still physically fit for slave labor.

• Selections occurred immediately upon arrival at a camp.

• Those who were too old or too young, or that appeared to be ill were immediately killed.

• Selections were held on a frequent basis within camps to weed out those prisoners that were becoming weak or ill.

The Final Solution

• This was the Nazi code word for their plan to annihilate every Jew living in Europe.

• The Nazis had several other plans to get the Jews out of Germany before arriving at the Final Solution to the Jewish Question:

• 1. Their first idea was to deport every Jew to another country. The incident of the St. Louis shows that this wasn’t a viable option since no country wanted a flood of refugees.

2. After the Nazis conquered France, they wanted to use the French island of Madagascar as a Jewish slave colony. This was a good idea until Germany invaded Poland.

• The Republic ofMadagascar is an island country off thecoast of southeastern Africa in the Indian Ocean.

• Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world. Madagascar is about 1,000 miles long and 250 miles wide.

• Poland had the largest Jewish population in all of Europe. Now there would be too many Jews to send to Madagascar.

• After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, the Nazis developed a comprehensive plan to annihilate the Jews but they didn’t know how to achieve this. On January 20, 1942, fifteen high ranking Nazi and German government leaders met near a lake in Berlin known as Wannsee. Reinhard Heydrich called the meeting where the way to achieve the “final solution to the Jewish question” was formed . Not one person at the meeting objected to killing every Jew in Europe, thus giving government sanction to genocide.

1. Round up all of the Jews and segregate them into ghettos so they would have a large number of them centralized in one location.

2. Create the Einsatzguppen (mobile killing units) to massacre whole Jewish communities.

3. Create death camps where large numbers of people could be killed efficiently and cost-effectively, and their bodies could be disposed of without attracting public attention.

4. Trains would be used to transport victims to the camps

The Einsatzgruppen

• Mobile killing squads made up of special duty units, composed primarily of SS and police personnel, assigned to kill Jews and other undesirables in Poland and the Soviet Union.

• The Nazis’ first attempt at mass executions operated under the command of Heinrich Heydrich.

• They followed the German army into Poland and rounded up “undesirables” in every village, transported the victims to a wooded area, stripped them of their clothing, told them to lie down in a ditch, and shot them.

• The Einsatzgruppen killed more than a million Jews and tens of thousands of Soviet and Polish political and religious officials, as well as gypsies.

• They shot men, women, and children without regard for age or gender.

• One of the worst massacres occurred near the Ukranian city of Kiev where 34,000 people were machine-gunned to death in a two day orgy of executions.

• This first method of mass execution encountered some problems for the Nazis:

1. The killers needed to look at their victims, and as hardened and brain-washed as they were, they turned to alcohol to help them

accomplish their work and also to forget what they did. Many developed psychological problems.

2. Gun fire attracted attention and they wanted to keep their mass executions a secret, not only from their own citizens, but from the world.

3. The Nazis needed to find a more economical and efficient way to kill

a larger number of people, quickly and more cheaply.

a. They experimented with many methods including blowing people up, but their remains flew up into trees, etc. and were difficult to hide.

• The Nazi idea to use gas as a means for mass murder came from their experiments with using gas to kill victims in the T-4 Program.

The T-4 Program

• In the fall of 1939 the German government established the Euthanasie Programme under the direction of Philip Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt.

• The headquarters for this program were at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin and the code name for this program was derived from its address: T-4 Program.

• The word “euthanasia” means “mercy killing” and is synonymous with physician-assisted suicide. The Nazis corrupted this word.

• The Nazi regime’s goal was to remove those people unfit to live and produce offspring from their population.

• The first phase of this program came under the Nuremberg Laws and required the sterilization of anyone deemed “unfit.”

• Those “unfit” included Jews, gypsies, and any person with a physical or mental defect. This included all handicapped people or those with incurable diseases or mental conditions in Germany. These victims were referred to as “life unworthy of life.”

• The very first victims were newborn babies that presented defects at birth. They were killed at birth in a discreet manner without their mothers knowing it .

• Euthanasia progressed to handicapped hospitalized patients that were killed by doctors with lethal injections of drugs. Their death certificates would state that they died of complications of pneumonia, etc.

• Before long gas chambers were constructed inside hospitals and handicapped patients were placed inside of them in groups and killed with carbon monoxide gas.

• Next, the Nazis constructed special gassing facilities that were built to look like medical institutions on the outside, but were killing centers for the handicapped.

Bernberg Euthanasia Facility

• Between December 1939 and August 1941, about 50,000 Germans were secretly killed by the Euthanasia Program.

• Under the T-4 Program it is estimated that as many as 400,000 may have been killed. The Nazis destroyed the records so that an accurate accounting can’t be made.

• It is important to note that when people began to suspect that their loved ones were being killed by medical facilities and physicians, they were outraged. The Christian church leaders spoke out against it and wrote to Nazi officials. Hitler capitulated to public pressure and the program was stopped for a year before secretly starting up again.

A. This is important because it shows that the Nazis responded to public pressure.

• At the end of World War II when American troops went into German hospitals, they found that doctors were still gassing civilians in euthanasia centers. Both doctors and nurses that were found to have participated in this program were put on trial in 1965. None were punished, and many saw nothing wrong with what they were doing.

The Gestapo

• Created by Hermann Goring on April 26, 1933.

• Transferred to Heinrich Himmler in April 1934.

• Himmler answered only to Hitler and through the SS was free to define “legality” and was unhindered by moral constraints.

• When Himmler became the head of all of the German police in 1936, the Gestapo was led by Reinhard Heydrich.

• The Gestapo became a tool of terror, often placing people in “protective custody” before sending them to concentration camps.

• Orchestrated pogroms against Jews including what came to be known as Kristallnacht.

• Some of the SS were part of the Einsatzgruppen.

– Most of the SS were professional men – which included lawyers, physicians, – and even clergymen. They were people

» that had “a heightened sense of duty.”

Pogroms

• Government sanctioned riots against a group of people because of religious, racial, or ethnic prejudice.

• Began in Russia in the late 1800’s under the Czar as a way to drive Jews out of Russia

• Adopted by the Nazis as a way to terrorize Jewish communities and kill Jewish citizens.

Ghettos• Segregated, walled-in areas of cities where Jews

were forced to relocate before they were transported to concentration or death camps.

• Jews were made to wear some kind of outward identification sign, such as a yellow star or an armband with a Star of David.

• The first ghetto was created by the Nazis on October 8, 1939, in the Lodz district of Poland. Other large ghettos in Poland were Lublin, Warsaw, and Krakow. Ghettos were formed in many Eastern European cities.

• Warsaw had the largest Jewish population in Europe with Jews comprising 30% of the city’s population.

• About 400,000 Jews were forced to move into the Warsaw ghetto. German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.

• Besides being over-crowded, the residents had restricted food rations thus producing hunger and then starvation. Squalid living conditions created an environment for diseases to breed which brought about immense suffering and death.

• During 1942 and 1943 the Nazis “liquidated” the ghettos by deporting the inhabitants to death camps, or by murdering them in the ghettos.

• In the summer of 1942 the Nazis removed 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. About 60,000 people remained in the ghetto.

1. Of those remaining in the ghetto, 750 young men and women decided to fight to the death rather than be sent like sheep to the slaughter house .

2. They were able to obtain some guns and ammunition and train themselves to fight.

3. With their limited resources, these brave young people were able to defend themselves against the Nazis from April 19 - May 16, 1943. Finally, the Germans began burning the ghetto, building by building until they either killed or burned to death everyone.