Nazi Policies Towards the Jews: From Ghettos to the Final Solution

Ghettoisation

• After occupying Poland in 1939, ​3 million Polish Jews​ came under Nazi control. They were forced into sealed, overcrowded ghettos in Poland. The conditions were bad, disease like typhus spread rapidly and starvation was common.

• The ​Warsaw Ghetto​ was surrounded by a ​3.5m high wall, with broken glass and barbed wire on it. Between ​January 1941 and July 1942, an average of ​almost 4,000 Jews died per month​ there from disease and starvation.

• In July 1942, over ​250,000 Warsaw Jews​ were deported to camps as part of the “Final Solution” and most of them were put to death.

​Einsatzgruppen (Death Squads)

Following the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, death squads rounded up all Jewish people, gypsies as well as communist leaders, and confiscated their valuables. then the victims were forced to remove their clothing and march to outskirts, where they were shot or gassed and buried into huge graves. By 1943, they had killed ​over 1.2 million people​ in the USSR.

The Final Solution & the Holocaust

• Decided at the ​Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the plan was to exterminate Jews in death camps.

• Almost ​6 million Jews​ were killed (Holocaust). A pie chart details victims by origin: ​Poland (3,000,000)​, the ​Soviet Union (1,252,000)​, ​Hungary (450,000)​, ​Romania (300,000)​, and others.

• An estimated ​5 million non-Jews​ (including Roma, disabled people) were also killed.

Jewish people in the death camps

• They are divided to two groups, people who were fit are given jobs to do until they were too weak to do them. Some people were forced to take part in cruel medical experiments.

• When they were sent to death, instead of shooting, gas chambers were used. Huge showers were built and up to 2000 Jews at a time were sent into these showers, supposedly “delousing”. then poison gas was released into the chambers, and after all victims were dead, prisoners took their “by products” (e.g. gold teeth, hair and glasses) and removed their bodies which were to be burned.

German propaganda

to ensure the holocaust went smoothly, the Nazis made videos to show that the resettlement camps were just labour camps and people were treated well.

this stopped German people from reacting negatively to what was happening and meaning that Jewish people were willing to organise the resettlement of fellow Jews.

Jewish Resistance & Liberation

Overtime, the Jews came to realise what was happening.

An uprising (against transportation to camps) occurred in the ​Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. After a month, the remaining ​56,000 Jews​ were arrested; ​7,000 were shot and rest were sent to camps.

when Germany was loosing the war, the Nazis tried to conceal their crime by digging up railways lines and destroy some records. Allies soldiers were shocked by the reality when the camps were liberated in 1945. Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz camp was hanged for war crimes at Auschwitz in 1947.