Mr. Hill study set 9 2024-2025 (The Holocaust)

The Nazi Order

Fighting between Nazi and Soviet troops along the Eastern Front was savage and brutal as Hitler strove to eradicate Jewish/Bolshevism. Hitler wanted to conquer the Soviet Union as part of his plan to create a “New Order” in Europe in which the Nazis would rule Europe and exploit its resources and people. In addition to enslaving thee conquested people to the German “master race,” the Nazis planned to exterminate “undesirable elements” such as Jews and Slavs. With the conquest of new territories, particularly Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, the Nazi’s new world order was based on its radical philosophy of “ethnic cleansing” the removal or the mass murder of a specific ethnic group-expanded significantly. In particular, their plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Third Reich targeted all Jews and as the number of Jews under the control of the Nazi regime grew exponentially as the Reich’s borders extended beyond Germany, the scope of forced deportations, massacres, and executions multiplied. The Nazis drove millions into forced labor and contraction camps. Between 1939 and 1944, about 7.5 million people were deported to Germany and put to work in factories, fields, and mines. Slave laborers helped to construct the Nazi “wonder weapons,” the V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 rockets; 20,000 prisoners died from the harsh conditions and brutal treatment that ended in death as consequence of exhaustion, disease, malnutrition, and beatings. An integral part of the new Nazi Order was the massacre of millions of Jews, Slavs, Russian POWs, and others consider subhuman or inferior in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust or Shoah, was the genocide-the mass murder of a target population based on race, ethnicity, or religion-of European Jews 1941 and 1945. The Hebrew term for Holocaust is Shoah, meaning catastrophe, but it is often used specifically to refer to the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews during World War II. Nazi Germany, its allies, and collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, approximately two-thirds or Europe’s Jewish populations. Although the Nazis persecuted who dared oppose them, as well as the Poles. Soviet POWs, disabled, Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals, Slavic people, and others reserved their strongest hated for the Jews

The Roots of the Holocaust

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis racially divided Germany between Aryans and non-Aryans, especially Jews. Beginning in 1934, the Nazi regime at first imprisoned or sterilized those people deemed harmful to Aryans, including criminals, the homeless, homosexuals, and those in mental institutions. At First, the Nazis began to kill people they deemed inferior, including the mentally disabled. Then After the war began, the Nazis began to persecute Jews in the lands they had conquered. They expelled Jews from jobs and schools and forced them to wear yellow Star of David badges; some Jews managed to flee Nazi-occupied Europe and others went into hiding-most famously the Frank family hid in a friend’s apartment in Amsterdam.

The Warsaw Ghetto

The largest number of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe lived in areas of Poland and the Soviet Union. In 1940 to control this sizable population, the Nazis at first forced the Jews throughout the Reich (from Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, and Ukraine) to migrate to specially designated areas of towns and cities, walled off from the surrounding neighborhoods, called ghettos.The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, Poland, where almost half a million Jews were imprisoned. The Nazis deliberately tried to starve residents by allowing only small amount of food to be delivered; as a result, 80,000 Jews died in the Warsaw ghettos from hunger, disease, and the cold. In 1942, the surviving Jews, 250,000 people, were eventually deported to death camps in Poland.

The Warsaw Uprising

However, in the spring of 1943, as the Nazis tried to round up the last remaining Jewish inhabitants to send them to the gas chambers of Treblinka death camp, a small band of Jewish men and women resisted. Using weapons and explosives smuggled into the ghetto, they engaged in urban warfare against the German army. After a month of brutal street fighting, the resistance fighters fighter were defeated. During the Warsaw Uprising, 13,000 Jews were killed; after the uprising, 50,000 Jews were sent to the Treblinka death camp

Destruction of Jewish/ Bolshevism

For many Nazis, when the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, World War II turned into a “race war” to destroy Jewish/Bolshevism by eliminating Jews and Russians as well as other “inferior” races according to Nazi ideology, including Poles, Salvs, and Roma. With the invasion of the USSR, the conflict degenerated into a war unlike any other war in human history-a murderous and brutal campaign of barbarity. For the Nazi leadership-political and military-World War II was a war of conquest and genocide. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 proved to be a turning point in the Nazi mistreatment of the Jews, and a wide-spread pogrom to kill all the Jews in Nazi-occupied territory began to take shape in the closing months of the year.

Killing Squads

Soon, the Nazis turned from the forced emigration and imprisonment of Jews in ghettos to the mass murder of them. Paramilitary killing squads, special units of the SS accompanying the German army, acted quickly to kill any Jews they could find in occupied Soviet territory; captured Jews were forcibly marched to open areas on the outskirts of towns and cities and were shot and their bodies were buried in mass graves. The killing squads murdered more than a million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Poles. In the fall of 1941, at Babi yar, near Kyiv in Ukraine, approximately 35,000 Jews were murdered in two days of mass excuses.

The Jewish Question

Since their rise to power, Nazi leaders were faced with the “Jewish Question”-what to do with the Jewish population in the Reich whose very existence the Nazis believed posed a grave danger to Germany. In the fall of 1941, Hitler, fearing another “stab in the back” by Jews on the home front during the waning days of World War I, ordered the mass deportation of Jews in the Reich east to Poland. He declared, “This criminal race has one million dead of the World War on their conscience and now again hundreds of thousands”. In the winter of 1941, Hitler’s violent antisemitic rhetoric escalated as the war turned more and more against Germany as the failure of the Wehrmacht to defeat the USSR and win the war became more apparent.

“The fall of the Jew”

As prospect for victory faded in the winter of 1941 as the red Army stopped the advance of the Wehrmacht, Hitler was under increasing pressure and he became more unhinged, first blaming his generals and then the Jews for Germany’s defeat outside of Moscow. With the attack of Pearl Harbor and Germany's subsequent declaration of war on the United States on December 11, 1941, Hitler now faced a world war that validated his ‘prophecy” of 1939. In 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag,Hitler predicted that a new world war would bring about the total destruction of the Jew in Europe. Hitler in his fanatical hatred of the Jews believed they had manipulated Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin to wage war against Germany. Believing the Jews had had unleashed World War II, Hitler lashed out at the Jews, predicting the world war would bring about “the fall of the Jews” once and for all. The final solution to the “Jewish Question’ became genocide.

The Wannsee Conference

On january 20, 1942, Nazi leaders met at the Wannsee Conference in a Berlin will to implement the “final solution of the Jewish question”- a plan that aimed at the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. Previous “solutions” had included deporting Jews to newly conquered territories in the East and rounding up Jews, Roma, Slavs, ad others from conquered areas, massacring them, and piling them into mass graves-the Holocaust by bullets. Another method forced Jews and other “undesirables” into truck and then piped in exhaust fumes to kill them, but these methods had proven too slow and inefficient for the Nazis. Senior - working to fulfill Hitler’s genocidal plan - me at the Wannsee Conference in order to coordinate the transportation of millions of Jews in the Reich and Nazi-held territory to vast death camps in Poland - the Holocaust by gas.

Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich, a high ranking SS officer, led the meeting of senior government officials to carry out the “final solution to the Jewish problem” becoming the architects of the Holocaust by organizing the genocide of Jews in German death camps. During Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich was responsible for establishing the SS paramilitary killing Squads that massacred more then one million Jews in the Soviet Union. At Wannsee, the Nazi leadership made plans to round up Jews from vast areas of Nazi-controlled Europe to create Jewish-free zones throughout the continent. It was determined that all Jews in the occupied territories would be “evacuated east” - a euphemism for transporting Jews to death camps in Poland to be exterminated. In late 1941 the Nazi’s built two experimental extermination facilities, including at Auschwitz in Poland, designed specifically for large scale murder of inmates. After the Wannsee Conference, an additional four death camps were built in Poland, including Treblinka where Jews where the main victims. The first Gas chambers were used three weeks later in February 1942. In May 1942 Heyrich was assassinated in Prague by Czech undercover agents trained by a British espionage group.

The Final Solution

The final solution was Nazi code for the discussion of all European Jews. Never before had a modern state set out on a campaign of genocide - the deliberate and carefully planned killing of an entire people on the basis of race politics, or culture. Beginning in 1942, the Nazi’s arrested and rounded up Jews throughout occupied Europe by hundreds of thousands, from France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union. The Jews then were transported by train or trucks to death camps, such as Auschwitz in Poland, where most eventually died.

Adolf Eichman

(*The thing about a Jewish woman dating his son being how he got found) Another attendee of the Wannsee Conference was Adolf Eichman who was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Eichman was in charge of designating and planning the logistics of the Holocaust - the transportation of European Jews to Death camps. Nazis had established their first concentration camp outside of Munich at Dachau to house political prisoners in 1933.

Nazi Network of Concentration and Death Camps

After the War began Nazis began to build concentration camps throughout Europe near railroads. Eichman’s railway network transported approximately 2.6 million Jews to Nazi Death camps. Jews were taken by train to consecration camps along railway lines; healthy inmates would work as slave labors until the died from exhaustion, disease, or malnutrition. Concentration camps were slave labor camps where prisoners died from starvation disease, harsh treatment, beatings, and executions. As one of the largest consecration camps, Buchenwald had more then 200,000 prisoners working 12 hour shifts as slave labors in nearby factories of German companies and hundreds died monthly.

Nazi Death Camps

Different from concentration camps Nazi death Camps have been called by many historians “factories of death.” The six Nazi Death camps were designed specifically for mass execution of prisoners using Zyklon- B posion gas, a cyanide -based pesticide, to kill thousands of people at a time in gas chambers; then their bodies were immediately cremated. Only three weeks after the Wannsee Conference, Jews were sent to Extermination camps in Poland where they would be executed in gas chambers; some capable of holding 2,000 people at one time. During the next four years, the Nazis murdered more then 6 million Jews, and another 5-11 million people, including Slavs and Roma - a total of 11-17 million.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz was the most infamous of the death camps and the largest killing facility in history. Auschwitz alone housed about 100,000 inmates in 300 barracks. Upon arrival at Auschwitz by cattle car, healthy prisoners were sorted for slave labor and the elderly, the the disabled, the sick, mothers, teens under 16, children, and infants, were sent to gas chambers, after which bodies were burred in crematoriums. “Their bodied were a world and now they were ashes,” commented one inmate forced to work in a crematorium.

At Auschwitz, others died of starvation and disease and some were victim of cruel experiments carried out by Nazi doctors like the infamous Josef Mengele the “Angel of Death”. Of the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust, over 20% died at Auschwitz. It's gas chambers built to gas 2,000 people an hour could gas 12,000 people a day. Of the estimated 1.6 million that died at Auschwitz, about 1.3 million were Jews; the rest were Poles, Soviet POWs, or Roma, as well as other small groups.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners

Hienrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, the paramilitary group (that included Hitler’s bodyguards, the secret Police the Gestapo, and military units) Was in charge of the concentration and death camps; all camps were patrolled by SS guards. There were approximately 200,000 German men and woman who were involved with the killing of the Jews and about 500,000 that participated in the locating, arresting, transporting, and guarding of the Jews. Hitler’s Willing Executioners were not just German but also included Lithuanians, Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles, Dutch, and French. Rampant antisemitism and dehumanization of European Jews for centuries lead to Germans and non-Germans to be ready to participate on the final solution. Moreover, several German business supported the Holocaust by manufacturing Zyklon B gas, building gas chambers and crematoria, and funding medical experiments, including Bayer a manufacture of aspirin. Although many Whermacht leadership participated in the final solution, there were those officers who rejected the genocidal crimes of the Nazi regime. Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (the solder depicted in The Pianist) of the Whermacht wrote, “with this terrible murder of Jews we have lost the war. We have brought upon ourselves an incredible disgrace, a curse that can never be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty.”

Anne Frank

Thousands of people in territory conquered by Germany collaborated by the Nazis and identified, arrested, and rounded up Jews in Holland, Hungary, Grease, Ukraine, Italy, the Soviet Union, Belgium, Norway, and Poland and sent them to concentration and death camps. In mid 1942, Anne Frank (1929-1945) and her Jewish family were forced into secret rooms of an attic of a home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to avoid being deported to a concentration camp. She wrote: “Countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate.. no one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children and babies and pregnant women - are all marched to their death.” Of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust 1.5 million were under 14. In August 1944, 15 year old Anne Frank, her parents, and others from the secret rooms were arrested and deported on the last train that ran from the Netherlands to Auschwitz. She was forced into labor; in February 1945, she died of typhus and was buried in a mass grave. In 1947 her father - her only servicing family member - published her diary (which he got from the owners of the house they had lived in) which discussed the prosecution of Jews and life under Nazi rule; The Diary of Anne Frank has been translated into seventy languages.

Final Solution - Death Toll

6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. 3 Million died in concentration camps from 1942-1945. 1 million died from starvation or disease in consecration camps. 1.3 million were shot during massacres. 700,000 were killed in mobile death vans. In addition another 5-11 million non Jews (Poles, Soviet prisoners, Roma, Gay men, Political opponents, mentally and physically disabled, and others) also died in the Nazi regime.

Country	Killed	% Jewish Population
Poland	3,000,000	90%
Germany	200,000	90%
Baltic Countries	228,000	90%
Netherlands	150,000	75%
Hungary	450,000	70%
Ukraine	900,000	60%

In only a few short years, Jewish culture, which had existed in Europe for 1,000 years, had been virtually obliterated by the Nazi regime in Germany and the territory that Germany had conquered.

Group	Killed
Jews	6 mill
Soviet POWs	3.3 mill
Non-Jewish Poles	1.8 mill
Roma	250,000 - 500,000
Serbs	300,000
Disabled	275,000
Gay Men	5,000 - 15,000
Jahova’s Witness	1,700
Others	200,000

The majority of victims of the final solution were Jews but there were millions of other victims.