Concentration and Death Camps, Events, and PeopleFall 09: Ms. McKevitt

World History: Holocaust

The Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933.

The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans persecuted and murdered millions of other people.

Approximately, 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust.

The Nazis established concentration camps to imprison political opponents, Jews and other people targeted on ethnic or “racial” grounds.

Nazis and Warsaw:

The Warsaw ghetto uprising that occurred in April-May 1943 was indeed one of the largest armed uprising in the history of organized resistance to the Nazis. It was sparked by rumors that the Nazis would deport the remaining ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest, symbolically most important Jewish uprising, and the first urban uprising, in German-occupied Europe.

Adam Czerniakow was ordered to give the Nazis six thousand Jews a day for the trains. He committed suicide in the Warsaw Ghetto on July 23, 1942.

He is remembered for his controversial speech, Give Me Your Children in which he pleaded with the Jews in the ghetto to give up children younger than ten years of age, as well as the old and the sick, so that others might survive.

With the Soviet forces at the gates of Berlin on April 30, 1945, Hitler preferred to kill himself rather than to be caught and take responsibility for his action during the war. His long-term mistress and new bride, Eva Braun, joined him in his suicide.

Nazi and Warsaw (cont…)

People to Remember:Adolf Hitler

"When I came to power, I did not want the concentration camps to become old age pensioners homes, but instruments of terror.“ –Adolf Hitler

The Chancellor of Germany, appointed in 1933.

A Holocaust victim who survived and became the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize

Elie Wiesel “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” –Elie Wiesel

Anne Frank

"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed." –Anne Frank

A young girl who died in the

Holocaust but whose memories

survive through the diary she kept.

Adolf Eichmann

The Head of the Gestapo section

for Jewish affairs.

“To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.” –Adolf Eichmann

Hermann Goering

The Nazi leader who wrote the memo asking an SS officer to prepare a plan for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” –

mass extermination- Hermann Goering

“Would you rather have butter or

guns? Preparedness

makes us powerful. Butter merely makes us

fat.”

Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler (center) with some of his Jewish workers at the Krakow enamel factory, 1943

“I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.” –Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler was declared a 'Righteous Person' by the Israelis. This was a Jewish honor bestowed on Gentiles, based on Jewish tradition. Oskar died in 1974 in Frankfurt.

Country Number Germany proper 131,800 Austria 43,700 Eastern territories 420,000 General Government 2,284,000 Bialystok 400,000 Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia 74,200 Estonia - free of Jews - Latvia 3,500 Lithuania 34,000 Belgium 43,000 Denmark 5,600 France / occupied territory 165,000 unoccupied territory 700,000 Greece 69,600 Netherlands 160,800 Norway 1,300

Concentration and Death Camps…

Country Number Bulgaria 48,000 England 330,000 Finland 2,300 Ireland 4,000 Italy including Sardinia 58,000 Albania 200 Croatia 40,000 Portugal 3,000 Rumania including Bessarabia 342,000 Sweden 8,000 Switzerland 18,000 Serbia 10,000 Slovakia 88,000 Spain 6,000 Turkey (European portion) 55,500 Hungary 742,800 USSR 5,000,000 Ukraine 2,994,684 White Russia excluding Bialystok 446,484 Total= 11,000,000

Concentration and Death Camps

Camp Location Established Number Murdered Auschwitz Poland (near Krakow) May 1940 1,100,000 Belzec Belzec, Poland March 1942 600,000 Bergen-Belsen Germany (near Hanover) April 1943 35,000 Chelmno Chelmno, Poland Dec. 1941 320,000 Dachau Germany (near Munich) March 1933 32,000 Majdanek Lublin, Poland February 1943 360,000 Mauthausen      Austria (near Linz) August 1938 120,000 Stutthof Poland (near Danzig) Sept. 1939 65,000 Treblinka Poland (near Warsaw) July 1942 n/a Westerbork Westerbork, Netherlands      October 1939 n/a

Concentration and Death CampsThis chart lists just ten of more than two dozen known concentration and death camps created by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Auschwitz was established in May, 1940 and was divided into three major camps. It was liberated by Soviet troops on 25 January, 1945.

Most of the inmates who escaped were either recaptured or shot. Dachau opened officially in Germany on Wednesday, March 22,

1933 and ultimately had a further 133 sub-camps. It was originally planned to house political prisoners and could accommodate 5000 inmates.

Ravensbrueck was located in Germany. Many brutal experiments were performed on the women there.

These mass murder camps were: Auschwitz II, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Their sole purpose was extermination. All were located in Poland.

Holocaust as a Whole

It is estimated that over 3,000,000 Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

Zyklon B gas was a colorless gas with a bitter almond smell. People being gassed suffered terrible fear, dizziness and vomiting before dying of asphyxiation.

Westerbork was a stop-over for prisoners before being shipped off to other camps usually in Germany or Poland. Westerbork was located in Holland. Bergen-Belsen was a special camp for people with diseases.

Kapos were hated: they were, after all, collaborator and they were usually cruel and sadistic and would do anything to retain their position.

Holocaust as a Whole (cont…)

Count Folke Bernadotte, vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, more than 15,000 Concentration Camp victims were allowed into neutral territory. 7,500 of these were inmates from Ravensbrueck, the only camp built specifically for female prisoners, and in operation since May 15, 1939. (A small camp for men was added later.)

Gypsies were originally thought to be members of the original Aryan race, and were initially not persecuted. But the Nazis came to see their nomadic lifestyle as an affront to their ideals, and they became a marked people. Slavs had always been on the Nazis' Wanted Lists, as their inferiority to the Germanic race had never been questioned. Granted, if the people of Slavic nations cooperated with the Nazis, such as the brutal Croatian Ustaša, the Hlinka Guard of Slovakia, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and the thousands of Ukranian SS members, they were more than happy to work with them.

Most people would probably think Poland suffered the heaviest losses of its Jewish community during the war, and they did indeed suffer heavily, losing 88% of the 3,300,000 Jews who lived in the country. Greece's Jewish population was reduced by 80%, 65,000 dying in camps, ghettos, or by other means. Germany lost 130,000 Jews, just over 55% of those still in the country at the start of World War II. By contrast, Lithuania was almost completely "Judenrein" ("cleansed" of Jews). Only 6% of its Jewish population survived to see the liberation.

Liberation of the Camps

Auschwitz was the biggest and most infamous camp of all. 75% of those who arrived there were killed soon after arrival.

After being killed, all prisoners were either cremated or buried in mass graves. Other prisoners, called the "Sonderkommando" ("special squad") were forced to move corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria or bury the dead in mass graves.

Anne Frank did go to Auschwitz, but was moved to Bergen-Belsen with her elder sister, Margot. Their mother, Edith, had to stay in Auschwitz. None of these three survived. Anne was the last of them to die. She died of typhus 5-6 weeks before Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British on 15 April 1945.

Auschwitz

In March 1946 Rudolf Höss was arrested. He gave evidence at Nuremberg and was then flown to Krakow where he was handed over to the Poles. He was tried, convicted and in April 1947 he was hanged in Auschwitz camp.

Auschwitz was, among other things, a work camp, so they needed strong and healthy men to work there. After the start of the Holocaust in 1942 most prisoners were brought to Auschwitz to be killed, though people's hopes sometimes rose when they saw the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei". Most women and children didn't survive long.

The SS did not want children under about 14. Only the strongest and healthiest survived the arrival. When prisoners started getting sick, they were killed right away, mostly in gas chambers.

Auschwitz (cont…)

"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks ata slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals"

Theodor Adorno

Child survivors of the Holocaust filmed during the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army, January, 1945.

Dead bodies of the victims in Auschwitz.

About 1.1-1.6 million Jews died at that terrible camp, all because of Nazi racial theories.

Josef Mengele the "Angel of Death", he was the one who determined who would be killed, and who would be forced to work.

Guards, usually German prisoners, kept the other prisoners under control. One of the more loathsome aspects of the Holocaust was the fact that some of the victims were forced to be oppressors too.

The Death Head units (Totenkopfverände) of the SS or Schutzstaffel (which literally means "protection squadron") ran all the concentration camps from 1934 onwards.

Auschwitz

Badges of the Holocaust

Badges of the Holocaust