Holocaust– refers to a specific genocidal event in twentieth-

century history: the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.

– Jews were the primary victims -6 million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons.

– Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.

Kristallnacht Progrom • In the first half of 1938, numerous laws were

passed restricting Jewish economic activity and occupational opportunities.

• Kristallnacht (Night of Crystal or Night of Broken Glass) took place on Nov 9 & 10, 1938

• Approximately 1,400 synagogues were burned and 7,000 stores owned by Jews and hundreds of homes were damaged and looted, thousands of Jewish males were arrested

Germans pass broken window of Jewish-owned shop

Synagogue on fire during the Kristallnacht Progrom

Synagogue on fire during the Kristallnacht Progrom

Synagogue on fire during the Kristallnacht Progrom

Anti-Semitism • Early Christian thought held Jews collectively responsible for the

crucifixion of Jesus. This religious teaching became embedded in both Catholic and Protestant theology during the first millennium, with terrible consequences for Jews.

• Term coined in 1879 in Germany, in an attempt to define anti-Jewish sentiment on a scientific basis

• Was used to justify the rejection of Jews as a different people, nation, and later race, that threatens the existence of the national unity and the national state.

• Became a political basis for the Nazi Party • All of these centuries of hatred were exploited by the Nazis and their

allies during World War II, culminating in the Holocaust, the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews. – Hitler’s goal was to create an “Aryan” race or a pure race

• The Nazi party used propaganda to spread Anti-Semitism feeling amongst Germans

• Propaganda is the distribution of information to influence or control large groups of people.

• In totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, propaganda plays a significant role in consolidating power in the hands of the controlling party.

• Shortly after rising to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler created the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP)

• Nearly all aspects of German culture were subject to the Propaganda Ministry's control, including films, theater, music, the press, and radio broadcasts.

• The principles of Nazism, including the antisemitism feelings were incorporated into nearly every newspaper, radio broadcast, and film produced in the Third Reich. These carefully-crafted messages were designed to mobilize the German population to support all Nazi military and social efforts, including the deportation of Jews and others to concentration camps.

Nazi Propaganda

• “Aryan” Race• Was believed to be the

master race or “pure” race

• Hitler believed the Jews and others were corrupting the German blood line

• Commonly shown as having blue eyes and blonde hair

Taken from the children’s book, The Poisonous Mushroom, the caption in this picture reads: “Here my little one, you get something very sweet, but as a reward you both must come with me.”

This caricature portrays an elderly Jew trying to tempt small children with candy. It relies on one of the basic fears of all parents and the common instruction to little children not to take candy from a stranger.

There are links made between “a stranger,” “danger,” “poison,” and “a Jew.” The Jew is portrayed as a dark, evil, threatening, manipulative stranger, as opposed to the innocent, pure, naïve Aryan children.

This is the cover of the children’s book by Ernest Hiemer "Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal..."

The Jew cries:"We don't care about Germany... The main thing is that things go well for us..."

Money Is The G-dOf The Jews:

"The G-d of the Jews is money. To earn money, he commits the Greatest crimes. He will not rest until he can sit on a huge money sack, until he has become the king of money.

"Daddy, someday when I have my own farm, no Jew will enter my house..."

How to Tell a Jew:"The Jewish noseis bent. It lookslike the numbersix..."

The number 6 is connected to Satan and this explanation of the “Jewish nose” gives it’s a devilish meaning.

Teaching like this became common within German schools

Without Solving theJewish Question NoSalvation for Mankind:

"He who fights the Jewsbattles the Devil.“

~ Julius Streicher

Left- “Adolf Hitler is victory!”Right- Toy soldiers

Weimar Republic and the Rise of the Nazi Party

• Weimar Republic was the gov that was established at the conclusion of WWI

• This gov. was forced upon the German people • Due to the instability within Germany many

people rejected the Weimar Republic• Hitler took advantage of this instability and

appealed the citizens of Germany – Inflation, Unemployment, Global Depression

• Jan 1933, Hitler was appointed the chancellor of Germany

Anti-Jewish Policy by year• 1933-34• All non-l'Aryans'' were dismissed from holding government jobs. This

regulation applied to public school teachers, university professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.

• A general boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses was proclaimed. Officially it lasted for one day, but actually it continued for much longer in many localities.

• This meant that Jews could not hold jobs in radio, in the theaters, or sell paintings or sculptures.

• Mass bonfires were ignited throughout Germany. Books written by Jews and anti-Nazis were burned.

• Jews were prohibited from owning land. • Jewish lawyers and judges were barred from their professions. • Jewish doctors were barred from treating "Aryan" patients. • Jews were prohibited from producing kosher meat.

Anti-Jewish Policy by year• 1935• The Reichsrag adopted the Nuremberg Laws, which declared that

Jews could no longer be citizens of Germany.• Marriage and intimate relations between Jews and those of "Aryan"

blood were declared criminal acts. • German females under the age of 45 were prohibited from being

employed by Jews. • 1936• Hitler temporarily relaxed the antisemitic propaganda and other

measures against Jews in order to avoid criticism by foreign visitors arrending the summer Olympic Games in Berlin.

• 1937• "Aryanization, " the confiscation ofJewish businesses and property,

intensified greatly.

Anti-Jewish Policy by year• 1938• The Reich Supreme Court declared that being a Jew was cause for dismissal

from a job. • The Nuremberg Laws were extended to Austria after, the annexation of

Austria. • All Jews had to add the names "Israel" and "Sarah" to their identification

papers, and passports were marked with the red letter J, for Jude (Jew). • Jews could no longer attend plays and concerts, own phones, or have drivers'

licenses, car registrations, etc. • Kristallnacht Pogrom (Night of Broken Glass): approximately 1,400 synagogues

were burned and 7,000 stores owned by Jews and hundreds of homes were damaged and looted.

• 30,000 Jews, most of them leaders in the Jewish communities, were sent to concentration camps. Many were offered the opportunity to leave the camps provided they could prove they had arranged their emigration from Germany.

• Very few Jewish children remained in German schools • All Jewish shops were ordered to close by December 31, 1938. • Jews had to abide by curfews.

The Ghettos• ghettos were city districts (often enclosed) in which the Germans

concentrated Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions.

• Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities.

• The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone.

• The Germans regarded the establishment of ghettos as only temporary. In many places ghettoization lasted a relatively short time. Some ghettos existed for only a few days, others for months or years.

• With the implementation of the "Final Solution" (the plan to murder all European Jews) beginning in late 1941, the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos. The Nazis either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them, usually by train, to killing centers where they were murdered.

• German SS and police authorities deported a small minority of Jews from ghettos to forced-labor camps and concentration camps.

A sign, in both German and Latvian, warning that people attempting to cross the fence or to contact inhabitants of the Riga ghetto will be shot. Riga, Latvia, 1941-1943.— US Holocaust Memorial Museum

An emaciated child eats in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. Warsaw, Poland, between 1940 and 1943.— US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Jewish children forced to haul a wagon. Lodz ghetto, Poland, wartime.

Life in the Ghettos-

• Watch: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?ModuleId=10005059&MediaId=1180 – Starvation within in the Ghetto

• Watch: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?ModuleId=10005059&MediaId=1219 – Working in the Ghetto

“Final Solution” • The Nazis frequently used indirect language to disguise

the true nature of their crimes. They used the term “Final Solution” to refer to their plan to annihilate the Jewish people.

• It is not known when the leaders of Nazi Germany definitively decided to implement the "Final Solution." The genocide, or mass destruction, of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of increasingly severe discriminatory measures.

• The genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of German policy under Nazi rule and the realization of a core goal of the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Concentration Camps & Killing Centers

• Concentration Camps– served primarily as detention and labor centers, as

well as sites for the murder of smaller, targeted groups of individuals.

• Killing Centers– essentially "death factories." German SS and

police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, PolandA women and children deemed unfit for work on their way to gas chamber #4

Crematoria at Majdanek

Slave Labor at Buchenwald

Horrors of the Holocaust ExposedHorrors of the Holocaust Exposed

Entrance to Auschwitz

The Perpetrators • Hundreds of thousands of people were involved, either

directly or indirectly, in implementing the Final Solution. • The core organizers, planners and perpetrators of the

annihilation of European Jewry came from the SS who passionately believed in the Nazi ideology – they were the backbone of the extermination camps and the mobile killing units personnel.

• Ordinary people from other nations also took part in the killing, whether as private individuals or as collaborators with the Nazi apparatus. Some people enlisted in the Waffen SS for active service owing to their belief in the Nazi ideology.

• Others acted out of opportunistic, monetary and career motives.

Perpetrator- Franz Stangl (Background)• Born in Austria in 1908, Franz Stangl joined the Austrian police in 1931 and

became a criminal investigations officer in the political division.• In March 1942, Stangl became commandant of the Sobibor extermination camp

in Poland. Later that year he became commandant of Treblinka where he was responsible for the deaths of 870,000 Jews. He also spent time at the San Sabba concentration camp.

• After the war Stangl returned to Austria, where he was arrested by the Americans for being an SS member (they did not know that he had participated in the extermination of Jews).

• Stangl was found out when the Americans began investigating the Euthanasia Program. About to be charged in May 1948, Stangl escaped to Rome, Syria, and eventually Brazil where he and his family lived under their own names until discovered in 1967.

• Stangl was tried in Germany and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1971.

• While in prison Stangl was interviewed by Gitta Sereny, a British journalist. The interviews were published in a book entitled Into That Darkness. The following is an excerpt from one of their discussions in prison.

Interview- Part 1• Q Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren’t really

human beings? • A: When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil… my train stopped

next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through the fence. I thought then, “look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they were put in tins.”

• Q: You said “tins.” What do you mean? • A: …I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes… which

looked at me… not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead… • Q: So you didn’t feel they were human beings? • A: Cargo. They were cargo.

Interview- Part 2• Q: When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? • A: I think it started the day I first saw Totenlager [the sub-camp where the gas

chambers stood] in Treblinka. I remember Wirth [first commander of the camp] standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity; it couldn’t have; it was a mass—a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, “What shall we do with this garbage?” I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo.

• Q: There were so many children, did they ever make you think of your children, of how you would feel in the position of those parents?

• A: No… I can’t say I ever thought that way… you see, I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube [the passage leading to the gas chamber area]. But—how can I explain it—they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips like…

• Q: Could you not have changed that?… In your position, could you not have stopped the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens?

• A: No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.

Liberation • As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi

Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease.

• 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

• Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world.

• The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery.

Liberation

• Watch:– http://

www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10005131&MediaId=198

– Hanover, Germany • Watch:– http://

www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10005131&MediaId=213

– Mauthausen, Austria

Watch liberation of Auschwitz: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10005131&MediaId=174

Hairbrushes of victims, found soon after the liberation of Auschwitz. Poland, after January 27, 1945.