The Holocaust: Biggest Atrocity of all Time??

The Holocaust began when Hitler came into power in 1933. The
term "Holocaust," originally from the Greek word "holokauston" which
means "sacrifice by fire," refers to the Nazi's persecution and planned
slaughter of the Jewish people. The Hebrew word "Shoah," which means
"devastation, ruin, or waste," is also used to describe this event. As well
as Jews, the Nazi party also targeted Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses, and the disabled. Anyone who resisted the Nazis were sent to
forced labour or murdered. The term Nazi comes from the
"Nationalsozialistishe Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" ("National Socialist
German Worker's Party"). The term The Final Solution was used by the
Nazis to refer to their plan of wiping out the Jewish people. Approximately
11 million people were killed during the Holocaust, 6 million of them were
Jews. The Nazis murdered approximately two thirds of the European
Jewish population and an estimated 1.1 million children. The Nazis
believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that there was a
struggle for survival between them and "inferior races." Jews, Gypsies and
the handicapped were seen as a serious biological threat to the purity of
the "German (Aryan) Race" and therefore had to be "exterminated." The
Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I, for its
economic problems and for the spread of Communist parties throughout
Europe. Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians and others) were also considered
"inferior" and destined to serve as slave labour for their German
masters.
On April 1, 1933, the Nazis instigated their first action against
German Jews by announcing a boycott of all Jewish-run businesses and on
September 15th 1935, the Nuremburg Laws were issued. These laws began
to exclude Jews from public life and included a law that stripped German
Jews of their citizenship and a law that prohibited marriages and
extramarital sex between Jews and Germans. These laws set a precedent
for even more anti-Jewish legislation. Over the years, more anti-Jew laws
were put in place, banning Jews from parks, fired them from government
jobs, made Jews register their property, and prevented Jewish doctors
from working on anyone other than Jewish patients. On November 9th
1938, the Nazis began a night of violence against the Jews that has come
to be known as Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass. This night
included the burning of Synagogues, breaking the windows of Jewishowned businesses, the looting of these stores, and many Jews were
physically attacked.

After the beginning of World War II, Nazis began ordering all Jews to
live within specific areas of big cities, called ghettos. They were forced out
of their homes and made to move into smaller apartments, more often
than not, sharing with other families. Some ghettos started out as "open,"
which meant that Jews could leave the area during the daytime but had to
be back within the ghetto by a curfew. Later, all ghettos became "closed,"
which meant that Jews were trapped within the confines of the ghetto at
all times. Nazis would order deportations from the ghettos, with up to
1,000 people per day from the larger ghettos being loaded onto trains and
sent to either a concentration camp or a death camp. To get them to
cooperate, the Nazis told the Jews they were being transported to another
place for labour. When Nazis wanted to kill all remaining Jews, they would
liquidate the ghetto by boarding everyone onto trains. When the Nazis
attempted to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto on April 13, 1943, the
remaining Jews fought back in what has become known as the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising. The Jewish resistance fighters held out against the Nazi
regime for 28 days, which is longer than many European countries had
been able to withstand Nazi conquest.
By the late 1930s, the Nazis had killed thousands of handicapped
Germans by lethal injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units followed in the wake
of the German Army and began shooting massive numbers of Jews and
Gypsies in open fields and ravines on the outskirts of cities and towns
they had invaded. Eventually, the Nazis created a more organized way to
kill large numbers of civilians. Six extermination centres were built in
Poland where large-scale murder by gas was conducted. Although many
people refer to all Nazi camps as "concentration camps," there were
actually a number of different kinds of camps, including concentration
camps, extermination camps, labour camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and
transit camps. From 1933 until 1938, most of the prisoners in the
concentration camps were political prisoners who spoke or acted against
Hitler in some way. However, after Kristallnacht, the persecution of Jews
became more organized. Leading to the increase in the number of Jews
sent to concentration camps. Life for Jewish prisoners in concentration
camps was horrible. Prisoners were forced to do hard, manual labour and
yet given tiny rations to keep them going. Prisoners slept three or more
people per crowded wooden bunk with no mattress or pillow and torture
within the concentration camps was common and deaths were frequent.
At a few of the Nazi concentration camps, doctors would perform
experiments on prisoners against their will. While concentration camps
were meant to work and starve prisoners to death, extermination camps
or death camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large groups of

people quickly and efficiently. Six extermination camps were built:

Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. Auschwitz
was the largest and most well-known concentration and extermination
camp built. It is estimated that 1.1 million people were killed at there.
Prisoners taken to these camps were told to strip for a shower, but rather
than a shower, they were taken to into chambers that would be filled with
gas and killed.
Although many people joined authorities to make sure something
like the Holocaust never happened again, there have been many other
mass genocide since that of the Nazis against the Jews. The Bangladesh
Genocide of 1971, the Guatemalan civil war in 1968-1996, Khojaly
massacre in Azerbaijan from 2526 February 1992 and, the most wellknown genocide since the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide in 1994. On
April 6, 1994, President Juvnal Habyarimana of Rwanda, a Hutu, was
returning from a summit in Tanzania when a surface-to-air missile shot his
plane out of the sky over Rwanda's capital city of Kigal and he was killed
in the crash. Although it was never determined who was truly responsible
for the assassination, Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsis and began the
slaughter. Between early April and mid-July 1994, at least 800,000
members of Rwanda's minority Tutsi group were brutally murdered by the
majority Hutus. The massacres only came to an end when the Tutsi-led
Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), backed by Uganda, overthrew the Hutu
regime.