Holocaust

Four Steps of the Holocaust

Vilification

  • Vilification: the act of saying or writing unpleasant things about someone or something, in order to cause other people to have a bad opinion of them.
  • Anti-Semitism
    • This means prejudice against or hatred of Jews
    • After difficulties brought about by war and economic hardship, Hitler aimed to unite Germany by challenging those he saw as a threat
    • Jews ran successful businesses so were seen to be taking German jobs
    • German people were brainwashed by propaganda to believe the Jews were bad
  • What is propaganda?
    • Propaganda is the use of the Media to aggressively promote one point of view.
    • Propaganda is ‘brainwashing’ of the public, convincing them of an ideological viewpoint.
  • To ‘brainwash’ the population, the government could:
    • Nazi Ideology must be pushed as the basis of society
    • Race
    • Space
    • Provide evidence and begin talking about said ideology, identify what/who your ideology is targeting

Discrimination

The Nazis discriminated against the Jews in many ways. A key aspect of this was the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation.

The first wave of Nazi antisemitic legislation, from 1933 to 1934, focused on limiting the participation of Jews in German public life.

  • ==Civil Service Law (April 7, 1933)==
    • The German government issued the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”
    • The law fired Jews and political opponents of the Nazis from civil service positions, including schools, universities, and government jobs.
    • They were exempt only if they had been in that job before August 1914, had fought in World War I, or had lost a father or son in the war.
    • Most Jewish lawyers were also forbidden from practising law.
  • ==Education Law (April 25, 1933)==
    • The German government issued the “Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities.”
    • The law stated that Jewish students could be no more than 5% of the student population of any public school or university.
    • Many Jewish students had to leave public school and start attending private school.
    • German schools taught Nazi racial ideas about the superiority of “Aryans” and the inferiority of Jews.
  • ==Sterilisation Law (July 14, 1933)==
    • The German government passed the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases.”
    • The law allowed the government to forcibly sterilize people with physical or mental disabilities so they could not have children.
    • This law later expanded to include Roma (gypsies), “asocials” and Afro-Germans.
    • This limited the participation of Jews in the experience of parenthood, forcibly taking away any choice they had of having or refraining from having kids.

In September 1935, the Nazi leaders announced the “Nuremberg Laws” which institutionalized many of the radical theories prevalent in Nazi ideology.

  • ==Reich Citizenship Law (September 15, 1935)==
    • This law defined who the German government considered “German,” and who was a “Jew.”
    • The law defined Jews as a race identified by blood and genealogy. It did not identify Judaism as a religion or culture.
    • Under this law, Jews lost their citizenship, and became “subjects of the state.”
  • ==Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour (September 15, 1935)==
    • The German government banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews.
    • It also made sexual relations between these “mixed race” couples illegal. This crime was called Rassenschande [Race defilement].

Nazi legislation in 1937-38 increased the segregation of Jews from their fellow Germans, ultimately requiring Jews to identify themselves in ways that would permanently separate them from the rest of the population.

  • ==Jewish Name Law (August 17, 1938)==
    • The “Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names” required Jews who did not have “Jewish first names” to take the middle names “Israel” (for men) or “Sara” (for women).
    • By January 1, 1939, all Jews needed to obtain new passports or identity cards listing their new names. These documents were marked with the letter ‘J’.
  • ==Jewish Badge Introduced in Germany (September 1, 1941)==
    • This further separated the Jews from German life, making identifying and excluding them that much easier

Separation

Case study: Warsaw Ghetto

  • Warsaw was the capital of Poland, which had a large Jewish community

  • Warsaw itself was occupied 4 weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 29 1939

  • The Ghetto was not decreed until over a year later, on the 12th of October 1940

  • The Ghetto was sealed on 15 November 1940. Jewish policemen guarded the inside of the wall, and Nazi and Polish officers patrolled the outside. Only those with special permits could leave the ghetto. Over 400,000 people were imprisoned.

  • An average of over seven people shared each room

  • From the outset, rations for food were minimal and starvation was common. Rations were initially set at approximately 800 calories a day – less than half of the daily recommended allowance for women (2000 calories per day) and men (2500 calories per day).

  • Smuggling food into the ghetto became a common survival method. Children often wriggled through the sewers to enter the city outside of the ghetto and sneak food back in. Others paid off Nazi gate guards, and some even climbed the 10ft wall. Some of those outside the ghetto also used the inhabitants’ unfortunate circumstances to their advantage, importing food and medicine into the ghetto to the highest bidder.

  • Almost a year prior to the establishment of the ghetto, on 26 October 1939, forced labour was made compulsory for all Jewish men and boys aged 14 – 60. This was extended to men and boys aged 12-60 in January 1940. Some Jews managed to keep their jobs following ghettoisation in Warsaw, but most were made unemployed.

    As the war effort continued, the need for cheap, and preferably free, labour increased. The Nazis increasingly turned to utilising the incarcerated Jews for forced labour such as construction work. By the summer of 1940, the Jewish Council in Warsaw was asked to supply lists of able-bodied Jewish men to work in labour camps. Failure to supply the number of men asked for resulted in random round-ups of Jewish men in the streets.

  • With over 400,000 people crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles, hygiene immediately became an issue in the ghetto. Many homes did not have access to running water. Soap was sparse and of poor quality. In addition to this, there were just five public bathhouses, serving approximately 17,000 people a month.

Ghettos

  • Closed ghettos (situated primarily in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union) were closed off by walls, or by fences with barbed wire. The German authorities compelled Jews living in the surrounding areas to move into the closed ghetto, thus exacerbating the extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions. Starvation, chronic shortages, severe winter weather, inadequate and unheated housing, and the absence of adequate municipal services led to repeated outbreaks of epidemics and to a high mortality rate. Most ghettos were of this type.
  • Open ghettos had no walls or fences, but there were restrictions on entering and leaving. These existed in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union, as well as in Transnistria, that province of Ukraine occupied and administrated by Romanian authorities.
  • Destruction ghettos were tightly sealed off and existed for between two and six weeks before the Germans and/or their collaborators deported or shot the Jewish population concentrated in them. These existed in the German-occupied Soviet Union (especially in Lithuania and Ukraine), as well as Hungary.

Extermination

The final solution was the Nazi decision to exterminate all Jews through the use of death camps, gas chambers, slave labour, and death marches.