The Holocaust Chapter 18, section 3

1933 - Hitler Comes to Power• Hitler makes anti-

Semitism the official policy of the Nazi State

• Constant attacks on the “Jewish Image” from mass media

• Jewish children were expelled from school

• Jews were forced to sell their business to “Aryans” at extremely low prices

Boycotts of Jewish owned business

• "Attention Germans. These Jews (five and dime) stores are the parasites and gravediggers of German craftsmen. They pay starvation wages to German workers. The chief owner is the Jew, Nathan Schmidt.

• Forced to wear badges identifying them as being Jewish

– Opens people up to attacks from Brown shirts, Police, SS

1935 - Nuremburg Laws• Defines “Jewishness”

– Non-practicing Jew + 3 or more Jewish Grandparents = Jew– Practicing Jew + 2 or more Jewish Grandparents = Jew

• Strips Jews of German citizenship

Outlaws marriages between Jews and Non-Jews

1938 – “Kristallnacht”

• “The Night of the Broken Glass”

• Mass looting and destruction of Jewish business and Synagogues

• Thousands of Jews were arrested

• Convinced many Jews that they could not outlast the Nazis– Hundreds of thousands of

German Jews began to seek refuge outside of Germany

1938 - Evian Conference

32 countries convened to discuss opening their borders to Jewish refugees. Only the Dominican Republic did

1939 - Warsaw Ghetto

• 400k Polish Jews were rounded up and confined to a small part of the city of Warsaw.

• Disease and Starvation ran rampant.

• Most would later be deported to Death Camps

Operation Barbarossa: the Invasion of the USSR

• Nazis at first encouraged native non-Jewish or communist Russians (which wasn’t many people) to kill their Jews on their own blaming them for Stalin’s evil practices.

• This led to early slaughters of Jews.

• The killing was not enough for Hitler.

1941 - “Einsatzgruppen” Mobile killing squads patrolled Nazi occupied

Russia killing Jews

33,000 in two days at Babi Yar

Einsatzgruppen troops began having mental breakdowns because of all the killing.

This is some of the first evidence that Nazi beliefs of super-humans thoughtlessly disposing of sub-humans is unrealistic.

A more efficient way of disposing the Jews was needed.

1942 - Wannasee Conference• Nazi leaders came together to discuss “the Jewish

Problem”• The “Final Solution” – Death camps would be

constructed to exterminate all European Jews– Also – Gypsies, the homeless, Jehovah’s Witnesses,

homosexuals, intellectuals, and dissidents

Different Camps• Different Camps• Labor Camps – workers

were slowly starved to death while working for the Nazi

• Death Camps (Concentration Camps) – People were sent to death camps for the extermination

• POW Camps – Russian POWs were worked to death in labor camps

Concentration Camps

Most prisoners were killed immediately on arrival in gas chambers

• The healthiest would be left alive to carry the bodies to the crematoriums– Most of these people did within of starvation or disease

within months of arrival

Jewish Resistance

• A few prisoners escaped to alert Jews in concentration camps of the Nazi’s plan to deport them to Treblinka

• Warsaw uprising – Nazis lost control of the Warsaw Ghetto for nearly a month

United States Role

• US knew about the ongoing Holocaust as early as 1942

• Press gave little coverage to the story

• Roosevelt form the War Refugee Board in 1944– Saves 200k

Jews

1944 – 1945 Liberation

As Allied troops advanced through Germany, they discovered the Nazi atrocities and liberated camps

November 1945 - Nuremburg Trials

• This was the first ever international court to prosecute “crimes against humanity”.

• All allies were represented.• The Soviet judge and

prosecutor was the toughest on ex-Nazis.

• The American lawyer was Robert Jackson.

• The constant statements of “We were just following orders” or “We didn’t know” we not accepted by the international court.

• 12 Nazi leaders were executed

The biggest result to come out of this trial was that individuals were responsible for their own actions – governments could not take the blame.

Final Toll of the Holocaust

• 5 to 6 million Jews• 1.8 – 1.9 million Christian Poles • 200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti

(Gypsies) • 200,000–300,000 people with

disabilities • 80,000-200,000 Freemasons • 100,000 Communists• 10,000–25,000 homosexual men • 2,500–5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses