Holocaust Notes

The Holocaust was a genocide (a deliberate and systematic killing of a group of people) of the Jewish people living in Germany and in Nazi-controlled territories between 1939-1945.

Background

  • Hitler’s rise to power in Germany was steeped in anti-Semitic rhetoric and hatred (Europe and the world had a long history of anti-Semitic sentiments).

  • Hitler and his Nazi followers used Jews as a scapegoat.

  • They blamed Jews for all of Germany’s problems including the poor economy, the rise of Communism, and even Germany’s loss during World War 1.

  • Once Hitler and the Nazis gained control over Germany, they passed new restrictive laws that targeted Jews and other people they believed were inferior.

Targeted groups: Jews, Slavs, Romas or Gypsies, Communists and Socialists, Religious minorities like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals, and those with mental and/or physical disabilities.

Economic Boycott

  • In 1933, Hitler declared a national economic boycott on Jews.

  • Jews were forbidden to enter or remain in the medical, legal, financial, or journalism professions.

  • Jews were not allowed to obtain business licenses.

  • All Jewish teachers and government employees were fired.

Concentration Camps

  • In 1933, the Nazis opened their first concentration camps (Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Ravensbruck).

  • They were designed to turn the prisoners into useful members of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  • The Nazis imprisoned all kinds of people in the concentration camps: Political opponents, Socialists and Communists, Gypsies and Roma, Jews, Homosexuals, Drunks and beggars, Journalists and priests who spoke out against them, those with physical and mental disabilities, Religious minorities like the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  • Prisoners were tattooed with numbers and given striped uniforms to wear with a triangle designation: red- political, pink- homosexual, yellow- Jewish, purple- Jehovah’s Witness, blue- immigrants, and green- criminal.

  • Prisoners experienced horrible conditions including starvation and disease.

  • At some camps like Dachau, the prisoners were experimented on (experiments included oxygen deprivation, hypothermia, and surgery without anaesthesia).

Nuremberg Laws

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws:

  1. Defined who was considered Jewish. Those who were Jewish were stripped of their political rights and citizenship.

  2. Banned marriage and intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews. Marriages between Jews and non-Jews were invalidated.

  3. Made it illegal for German women under the age of 45 to work as maids in Jewish households.

Propaganda

  • Hitler used propaganda to convince the Germans that Jews were evil and that Germans were superior to them and other “inferior” groups.

  • Newspapers and comic books published vile stories against Jews.

  • German children in schools and in the Hitler Youth were taught to believe Hitler’s lies.

Kristallnacht

  • When a 17-year-old Jewish refugee from Poland discovered his parents were among the thousands of Polish Jews expelled from Germany, he killed a German diplomat in Paris.

  • Nazi officials then ordered an attack on Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland.

  • The attacks on November 9-10 are known as Kristallnacht (night of broken glass)

  • Mobs of angry Nazis, including members of the SA (the military wing of the Nazi party also called Storm Troopers or Brownshirts) and the Hitler Youth, burned synagogues, broke into Jewish homes and businesses, and desecrated Jewish cemeteries.

  • About 1500 Jewish synagogues and 7500 Jewish businesses were destroyed.

  • Hundreds of Jews were killed and hundreds more were injured.

  • The SS (Schutzstaffel, the elite guard of Hitler’s Third Reich) and the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) arrested between 26,000-30,000 healthy Jewish men and threw them into concentration camps.

Ghettos

  • In 1939, the Nazis rounded up Jews living in Poland (about 3.3 million) and in other Nazi-occupied countries ad confined them to ghettos.

  • Ghettos were sections of major cities where only Jews could live.

  • Entire villages were uprooted and forcibly transported to ghettos (some walked, some on trains of cattle and freight cars)

The Final Solution

  • In 1941, Nazi leaders came up with a “Final Solution” about what to do with Jews.

  • They build the first death camps in Poland (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka).

  • A network of trains composed of cattle or freight cars began transporting Jews to the death camps.

  • They were not given any food or water for the journey nor were there bathrooms.

  • They were not protected from the extreme heat or cold, so many died before they reached their destination.

  • Upon arrival, the guards took all of the prisoners’ possessions.

  • They were forced to strip and had all of their hair shaved.

  • The healthiest (about 20% at Auschwitz) were kept as labourers or used for medical experiments.

  • The young, old, and sick were herded into gas chambers that were filled with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B (contained cyanide) gas and killed.

  • Before disposing of the bodies, the Nazis collected whatever they could use or had value such as human fat for soap, colourful tattoos for decorations, human hair to be woven into wigs, slippers, and mattresses, gold fillings, and jewellery.

  • The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned in crematoriums.

  • When transportation to death camps was not available, the Nazis simply lined up their prisoners and shot them.

Resistance

  • There were Jewish resistance movements like the one in the Warsaw ghetto, but they were all easily defeated by the Nazis.

  • However, there were some amazing accounts of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to help their Jewish friends, neighbours, and even strangers escape the Nazis.

  • Jews called these people “Righteous among the Nations.”

World Response

  • Many Nazi allies, including Vichy France (Nazi-occupied France), helped round up Jews or allowed the Nazis to transport Jews through their countries to the concentration and death camps.

  • Despite reports of the Nazi treatment of Jews and other ‘undesirables.’ the Allies did very little to help.

  • Immigration policies in countries like the United States blocked Jewish immigration and prevented Jews from taking refuge.

  • Between 1933-1939, about 90,000 Jews escaped Germany and Austria.

  • Many Jews who wanted to escape. couldn’t - the Nazis had confiscated their legal documents and they were not allowed to access their money in the German banks.

  • Others could not secure permission to stay in another country.

Attempts to Help

  • The April 1943 Bermuda Conference between American and British officials discussed rescuing the European Jews, but they ended up doing nothing.

  • In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board.

  • They helped Jews in Hungary and Romania, but could not help Jews in the heavily Nazi-occupied areas.

Truth Revealed

  • The indisputable truth of the Holocaust was uncovered when Allied forces liberated the concentration and death camps.

  • The soldiers who liberated the camps saw first-hand the piles of bodies, ashes in the crematoriums, warehouses of human hair, and the emaciated prisoners.

Result

  • About 6 million Jews and millions of other “undesirables” were killed by the Nazis (possibly as many as another 5 million).

Nuremberg Trials

  • Between November 1945- September 1946, 22 key Nazi leaders were placed on trial (19 were convicted, 3 were acquitted).

  • Between 1946- 1949, other lower-ranking Nazi officials were placed on trial at Nuremberg.

  • Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann evaded capture until 1960. In 1961, he was tried and convicted in Jerusalem.