The Holocaust

Background Info.• Goal of Nazi Germany: extermination of all Jews in Europe• Out of 8.3 millions Jews, 6 million were killed• Other victims of Nazi Germany:

– Gypsies– Christians suspected of Jewish ancestry– Homosexuals– Handicapped– Anyone opposing the Nazis– Anyone considered “inferior” to the Aryan race

• Total estimated # of people killed: 13-15 million

How it began• Centuries of Christian anti-Semitism had already

existed• Hitler became dictator of Germany

– began the war against the Jews

• Economic hardships in Germany were blamed on the Jews

"What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the

Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor.

When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the

Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of

capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods.”

- Joseph Goebbels—head of propaganda

The New Nazi Religion

Initial treatment of the Jews• Jewish businesses were boycotted and vandalized• Fired from jobs in government and universities• Lost citizenship and all rights• Kristallnacht—Nov. 9,10, 1938—Nazi attack on

Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues• Forbidden to intermarry with Germans• Evicted from their homes and forced to live in the

ghettos

Hitler Youth

Sept. 1933

Hitler Youth—throwing mock grenades in 1936

Hitlerjugend"Youth Serves the Führer"

“None of us who rose to any high rank in the Hitler Youth could say

that we had a clear conscience. All of us, perhaps unknowingly, had

looked the other way, preferring not to know the truth. Sadly, now, we re the other part of the Holocaust, the

generation burdened with the responsibility for Auschwitz. That is our life sentence for having been the

enthusiastic followers of Adolf Hitler.”

Alfons Heck, from Parallel Journeys

1935: Two Jewish pupils are humiliated at their school and before their classmates. The inscription reads, "The Jew is

our greatest enemy! Beware of the Jew!

First they came for the Jewsand I did not speak out -because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the communistsand I did not speak out -

because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out -because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for meand there was no one left

to speak out for me.

Martin Niemöller –wrote after imprisoned at Dachau, a pastor in the German Confessing Church who spent seven years in a

concentration camp.

Nuremberg Laws

Forced to Wear the Star of David on all Clothing

Kristallnacht—Nov. 9, 10 1938 (Night of the Broken

Glass)

Burning Synagogue in Baden-Baden

Shattered Storefront

The Ghettos

Deportation

Cattle Wagons

The concentration/death camps• Shipped from the ghettos to camps in cattle

wagons• Hard physical labor, meager rations, brutality and

abuse• The “Final Solution” (plan to exterminate the Jews)• At the camps, the Jews were packed into chambers• A gas called “Cyclon B” was dispersed• Bodies were burned in a crematory

Elie Wiesel at Dachau--1945

“How do you teach events that defy knowledge, experiences that go beyond

imagination? How do you tell children, big and small, that society could lose its mind and start murdering its own soul and its

own future?How do you unveil horrors without offering at the same time some measure of hope?Hope in what? In whom? In progress, in

science and literature and God?”

~ Elie Wiesel

Concentration Camps

                                                                                                                                                                              

                      

Auschwitz

“Work Shall You Make You Free”—at Auschwitz

Roll Call At Buchenwald--1938

Cyclon B

Crematory

An American officer’s description of Ohrdruf, the first camp liberated by the Americans

“As we burst into the camp and spread out, I saw in front of me a row of wooden one-story

barracks… One of my men came for me, ‘You’d better come with me.’ His voice was serious. I followed him across the yard to a building…The

windows were all sealed up. Outside… eight automobiles, all up on blocks… The exhausts

were piled in through the wall of that building. We went inside the door. In the room… there was human excretion, vomit, urine, blood all over the

room. I did not understand.”

Con’t.

“And there were showerheads and faucets, all over the wall. One of my men called out to me. He said: ‘What

the hell’s going on here? There is no water.’ We entered the back room filled with benches and tables. And on one

of the tables there were thousands of gold wedding rings… piles of human teeth with gold fillings… It was

obvious that someone was there counting them. We went outside into the yard. In front of me I could see human

hair. There were piles of boots, shoes, suitcases, eyeglasses. To my left were four-wheel hay wagons and

two-wheel pushcarts. These wagons contained nude bodies… men, women and children, even babies. All

nude, all dead, all piled as high as they could basically pile them.”

The end of WWII • Germany was defeated in May of 1945• The survivors:

– Most emigrated to Palestine (now Israel)– The State of Israel was established as a Jewish

homeland in 1948– Others came to the U.S. or any country that

would accept them

Palestine—Israel Created in 1948