Download The Holocaust

The Holocaust
Chapter 16 Section 3 Notes
Main Idea
•During the Holocaust, Hitler’s Nazis killed six million Jews and five million other “non-Aryans”.
•The violence against Jews during the Holocaust led to the founding of Israel after World War
II.
Introduction
•Nazis proposed a new racial order.
•Claimed that Germanic people or “Aryans” were the master race.
•Aryan actually refers to the Indo-European peoples who began to migrate into the Indian
subcontinent around 1500.
•Nazis believed that non-Aryans were inferior.
•Belief led to the Holocaust, systematic slaughter of Jews and other groups judged inferior by
the Nazis.
The Holocaust Begins
•For generations, many Germans, along with other Europeans, had targeted Jews as the cause
for their failures.
•Some Germans even blamed Jews for their country’s defeat in World War I and for its
economic problems after the war.
•Nazis made targeting Jews a government policy.
•The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, deprived Jews of their rights to German citizenship
and forbade marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
•Laws also limited the kinds of work that Jews could do.
Night of the Broken Glass
•Herschel Grynszpan, a 17 year old Jewish boy, shot a German diplomat after hearing that his
father had been deported from Germany to Poland.
•Germans are furious and, in response, they launch a violent attack on the Jewish community.
•November 9 – storm troopers kill around 100 Jews.
•Main streets were covered in shattered glass.
–Kristallnacht – “Night of Broken Glass”
A Flood of Refugees
•After Kristallnacht, some Jews realized that violence against them would only increase.
•Many Jews fled Germany.
•Hitler later conquers other territory in which millions of Jews lived.
Emigration Solution
•At first Hitler favored the idea of emigration as a way to rid Germany of the Jews.
•After admitting tens of thousand of Jewish refugees, countries closed their doors.
–France, Great Britain, and the United States
•Germany took this as meaning that the other countries agreed that Jews were lesser beings.
Isolating the Jews
•Since emigration was not working out, Hitler devised another plan.
•He ordered that Jews, in countries he had control over, be moved to designated cities.
•Nazis herded Jews into overcrowded ghettos.
–Sealed them off with barbed wire and stone walls.
•Hitler’s hope?
•Jews would starve and die from disease.
Jewish Resistance
•Despite horrid living conditions, Jews still hung on.
•Some formed resistance organizations within the ghettos.
•Struggled to keep their traditions.
•Teachers taught lessons in secret schools.
•Scholars kept records so that people would one day find out the truth.
The “Final Solution”
•Hitler grew impatient waiting for Jews to die from starvation or disease.
•He developed a plan for direct action called the “Final Solution”.
•The Final Solution was a program of genocide (the systematic killing of an entire people).
The Aryan Race
•Hitler believed that his plan of conquest depended on the purity of the Aryan race.
•In order to protect the racial purity, he had to eliminate other races, nationalities and other
“subhuman” groups.
•Inferior groups – Gypsies, Poles, Russians, homosexuals, insane, disabled, incurably ill and of
course, the Jews.
The Killings Begin
•Hitler’s security force moves from town to town across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
to eliminate Jews.
•Once Jews were rounded up, they placed them in pits and shot them, creating mass graves.
•Some Jews were taken to concentration camps (slave-labor prisons).
–Germany and Poland
•Hitler once again hoped that the horrible conditions would speed up the total elimination of
Jews.
Conditions
•Prisoners worked seven days a week as slaves.
•Severely beaten or killed if they did not work fast enough.
•Meals – thin soup, scrap bread and potato peelings.
•Most prisoners lost 50 pounds in first few months.
•“If a bit of soup spilled over, prisoners would…dig their spoons into the mud and stuff the
mess in their mouths.”
The Final Stage
•Final Solution reached its last stage in 1942.
•Nazis now had extermination camps with gas chambers.
–Kill up to 6,000 people in one day.
•At Auschwitz, prisoners were first seen by a panel of doctors.
•The doctors decided whether they were weak or strong.
•If they were weak, they were executed that day.
–Mainly women, children, elderly and the sick.
The Executions
•The weak were told to undress and shower.
•They were led to a chamber with fake showerheads.
•Cyanide gas poured from the shower heads and killed the people within a matter of minutes.
•What did they do with all the bodies?
•Soon, Nazis installed crematoriums.
The Survivors
•Some six million European Jews died in the death camps and massacres.
•Less than four million survived.
•Some escaped with the help of non-Jewish people.
•Regardless, those that experienced the Holocaust were forever changed.