Research Paper Holocaust Overview

Jaymie Bush

Mr.Neuburger Eng Comp 102-118 9 May 2013

Bush 2 The Holocaust led to the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Nazi party rose to power due to the social and political circumstances characterized by economic instability. However, Hitler and the Nazi party absolutely detested Jews and predicted he would rid Europe of all Jewry. Most people realize a holocaust occurred during World War Two, but most do not understand how the Nazis murdered over twelve million people. In order to comprehend how the Nazis pulled off such a horrendous event, one needs to understand how the Nazis rose to power. Nazi rise to power According to the Holocaust article on Yad Vashem, many Germans cannot concede their countrys defeat in World War I. The Nazis claim the Jews betray Germany during the war by arguing, backstabbing and weakness in the rear causing the defeat, therefore, the Nazis demand revenge against the Jews. After being wounded in the war and released Hitler joins a small insignificant group, the National Socialist Party and becomes the groups leader, and forms the racial and anti-Semitic principles. While in prison, following his failed attempt to seize power of Munich in 1923, Hitler writes Mein Kamph outlining his racial views, and the web article brings to light how Hitler believes the Jews to be the root of all evil. Hitler realizes that in his attempt to seize power he must employ legitimate democratic and political support. In March 1933, after Hitler assumes power, organized attacks on Jews break out across Germany. Furthermore, within a few months, democracy is obliterated in Germany, and the country becomes a centralized, single-party police state. Nazi anti-Jewish policy functions on two levels: legal measures to rid the Jews from society and strip them of their rights and property, and also to engage in provoking abuse, terror, and violence. There was one goal: to make Jews leave Germany. (Yad Vashem)

Bush 3 Nazis views on Jews anti-Semitism As Yad Vashem article Anti-semitism explains, the term anti-Semitism is used with reference to all types of Jew-hatred, both historical and contemporary. Jew haters began declaring that Jews were an inferior race on the evolutionary scale. The Nazi Party was one of the first political movements that were based on racist anti-Semitism. The Nazis discriminated against the Jews from the beginning of their command. Hitler formed laws separating Jews from the rest of society, and later exterminated members of the inferior race. (Yad Vashem) In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum article Nazi racism it stated Hitler and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous race which lived off the other races and weakened them. Hitler formulated the ideas that are known as Nazi ideology. He believes that a persons characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and behaviors are determined by the racial make-up, and that those traits are transmitted from one generation to the next. The Nazis define Jews as a race and associate it to a wide variety of negative stereotypes about Jews and Jewish behavior, Furthermore Germanys Government bases their actions on racist beliefs that Germans are a superior people, and on an anti-Semitic ideology, and use World War II as primary means to achieve their goals, the Nazis Targeted Jews as the main enemy. (TUSHMM) Nuremberg LawsIn the article Nuremberg Laws on The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it states, Nazi party leaders announced new laws that institutionalized many of the racial theories underpinning Nazi ideology. The Nuremberg Laws on citizenship and Race were created in 1935 in Nazi Germany and announced at the annual rally held in Nuremberg on September 15. These laws basically deprived Jewish people of their citizenship and is one of the

Bush 4 first steps in the annihilation of the Jewish race in Germany. Furthermore these laws also prohibit Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of German or German related blood. Jews are banned from Universities; Jewish actors are dismissed from theaters; Jewish authors books are rejected by publishers; and Jewish journalists are unable to find newspapers that will publish their writings. The laws are based on a chart similar to a genealogy chart, all four grandparents had to be German to be classified as a German citizen, people are considered a Jew if they had three or more Jewish grandparents. Even those with Jewish grandparents who had converted to Christianity could be defined as Jews (USHMM). According to the Danish Center for Holocaust Genocide Studies (TDCFHGS).more than 2000 racist laws and ordinances were issued between 1933 and 1945. The Reichstag Fire Decree for instance, gives the Nazi state the right of imprisoning Jews and other political enemies without legal trial (The Nazis and antiSemitism). Kristallnacht- Night of the Broken GlassAccording to the article Kristallnacht on Yad Vashem a massacre, a governmentcoordinated attack against Jews by the Nazis throughout Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938 occurs. Kristallnacht refers to the glass of the shop windows smashed during the riot. The massacre is a launched retaliation for the assassination on Nov.7, 1938 of German Embassy official Ernst vom Rath who is killed by a young Jewish refugee Herschel Grynszpan. During the riot the shop windows of Jewish businesses are

Bush 5 smashed, the stores looted, in the image above is a map showing some of the hundreds of synagogues burned down the night of the massacre. Jewish homes are burnt down while fire fighters stood by and watched, only intervening if Aryan buildings were put in jeopardy. Many Jews are physically assaulted, and ninety Jews are murdered, 30,000 Jews are arrested and deported to the concentration camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, where they are subjected to inhumane and brutal treatment many of them died (Yad Vashem). On Fold3 the web article brings to light how Kristallnacht changed the face of Nazis policy towards the Jewish population and illustrates the true nature of Nazi ideology. The Nazis blame Herschel Grynszpan for the night of violence; however the true cause of the massacre was the hate and prejudice of the Nazi regime. After this riot Jews had no rights in the third Reich, and those who did not escape, becomes victims of the Nazi Holocaust (Kristallnacht). GhettosAccording to the Holocaust Studies Ghettos and the Final Solution, Rather than letting the Jews go, the Nazis start a four point plan; marking the Jews with yellow badges, force them into slave labor, loot their property, and seal them into Ghettos closed off by a wall topped with barbed wire. Jews were rounded up and forced to live in unbearable ghetto conditions, the most famous is the Warsaw Ghetto. Life in the ghetto was intolerable; there was no sanitation, over

Bush 6 75,000 people in the ghetto died of disease and starvation. The Jewish population rises from 350,000 to 450,000 they were all thrown in a slum that compromised 2.3% of the city area (Holocaust Studies). The Warsaw Ghetto states, as more and more Jews were brought in from the neighboring towns and villages, conditions became more cramped. By April 1941 the death rate in the ghetto is six thousand per month. Funeral carts would collect the corpses and was taken to mass graves, the families were forced to strip their relatives in order to sell or use the clothes. The Final Solution was decided in 1942, between July and September 300,000 ghetto Jews were transported to Treblinka Extermination Camp. (Warsaw Life) Wannsee Conference and The Final SolutionAccording to the information found in the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies The Final Solution, The Wannsee Conference is one of the most notorious events of World War II. On January 20, 1942 high ranking officials from the Nazi party, the SS, and the German state met to coordinate and finalize what they call the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The meeting took place in Berlin at a villa by a lake known as Wannsee, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, he spoke about the inclusion of 11,000,000 Jews. The Final Solution was the Nazis code name for the carefully planned destruction of all European Jews; the term is used to hide their policy of mass murder from the rest of the world. After the solution was revealed, Jews are to be transported from German-occupied Europe to SS operated extermination camps in Poland, after the conference Jews are deported in large numbers to the Ghettos in the east and murdered. (TDCFHAGS) As a result of the meeting a network of

Bush 7 extermination camps are established in which millions of Jews were murdered in 1942-43(Yad Vashem) Extermination methodsThe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shows, the German special duty units referred to as mobile killing squads also known as Einsatzgruppen are assigned to kill Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union; the squads follow the German army and carry out mass murder operations, killing all Jewish men, women and children of all ages and gender, by the spring of 1943 more than a million Jews have been killed. September 3, 1941 Experimental gassings begin in the gas chambers at Aushwitz I the main camp in southern Poland. The first to be forced into the gas chamber is 600 ill or weak Soviet prisoners, to test the potential of Zyklon B gas, normally use for this is insecticide however the success of these experiments cause the adoption of this crystalline hydrogen cyanide gas to be used as the killing agent for the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Mass killings begin there in the beginning of 1942. Furthermore in December of 1941 Chelmno is the first Nazi camp to use the poison gas for mass killings, using three gas vans, victims are being deported to the camp and forced into gas vans they were ordered to undress, stripped of their belongings and tricked to get in the van where a tube directs the vans exhaust into the sealed area holding fifty to seventy people. After all the occupants locked inside are all dead the van is driven to mass graves and removed by Jewish slave laborers. This method killed nearly 300,000 people by mid-July 1944 (The Wannsee conference and The Final Solution). According to The Implementation of the Final Solution, the death camps, the Jews of the Lodz ghetto and the vicinity were the primary victims deported to Chelmno. Only three Jews survived this death camp. March of 1942 after the guidelines of The Wannsee Conference are put in place, the Germans established three extermination camps;

Bush 8 Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Nazis purpose in building these camps was to carry out mass murders of all European Jewry as part of the Final Solution. No selections were performed in these camps, as trains are arriving, the victims men, women, and children are sent directly to the gas chambers. The corpses were later burned in an attempt to destroy any evidence left behind; approximately 1,700,000 Jews are victims to these three extermination camps. In late 1944 Himmler ordered an end to the murders in gas chambers, however prisoners continued to die of exhaustion, starvation, and disease (Yad Vashem).