Download Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust

Anti-Semitism
and the
Holocaust
“Never Again”
Vocabulary
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Jews
Anti-Semitism
Nazi
Scapegoat
Ghetto
Deportation
Forced Labour Camps
Concentration camps
Death camps
Extermination
Genocide
What is Genocide?
Genocide
• Term coined in 1944 as direct result of the Holocaust
• The United Nations definition (1948):
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
• Introduction to the Holocaust: Animated Map
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=100
05143&MediaId=3372
• WWII and the Holocaust: Animated Map
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=100
05143&MediaId=7827
Two Jewish girls: Two young
cousins shortly before they
were smuggled out of the
Kovno ghetto.
A Lithuanian family hid the
children and both girls survived
the war.
Kovno, Lithuania, August 1943
Portrait of members of a Hungarian Jewish family. They were
deported to and killed in Auschwitz soon after this photo was
taken. Kapuvar, Hungary, June 8, 1944.
By the Numbers
Total deaths in Holocaust:
6 million Jews
5 million “others”
• Jewish population before war: 9.5 million
• Jewish population after war: 3.5 million
• Total Jewish deaths estimated at 5.7 million
By the Numbers
• Total deaths in WWII: At least 60 million
• 25.5 million Soviets
• 7 million Germans
• 7 million Poles
• 388,000 Brits
• 292,000 Americans
• 42,000 Canadians
PART I: War and
Anti-Semitism
• Anti-Semitism was not invented by Hitler!
-Only unique element: Concentration
camps
• 4 major categories:
-Religious (basis for all others)
-Economic
-Political
-Racial
• Nazis regarded Jews as a “race”, not a
religion
• “Justified” their actions by saying the Jews
had a genetic flaw and needed to be
eliminated
Jewish History
Two Wars:
1. 70 A.D.
2. 132-135 A.D.
1. Jewish war against Rome
2. Freedom fighter and Israeli hero Bar Kochba
-Over .5 million Jews fight Romans
-By 135 A.D., Romans kick Jews out of Jerusalem
=Jews in permanent exile
By 1,000 A.D.
many Jews
settle in
Europe =
Economic
benefits for
Europe
• By 1,000 A.D. many Jews settle in Europe
-Economic benefits for Europe
-By 20thC, approximately 3 million
Jews live in Poland
• Germany established as nation by 1871
Adolf Hitler
• Active in WWI
Adolf Hitler
• 100,000 Jews fought in WWI for Germany;
Hitler denies it
• Desperate to protect the “Volk”
(Volksgemeinshaft): Blood and Soil
• Coins the “Final Solution to the Jewish
Problem / Question”
-Jews assimilating too well= “Jewish
Problem”
• “CONSPIRACY”: Hitler’s favourite word
Rise of the Nazi Party: WWI
WWI:
-Austria declares war on Serbia
-Austria allied with Germany; Serbia with Russia
-1914: Germany declares war against France and
Russia
-Hungary and Turkey join Germany; Brits join
France / Russia and form the Allies
-1917: Russian Revolutions; Russia pulls out
-April 1917: U.S. enters war, dominates
Rise of the Nazi Party
Aftermath of WWI
• Paris 1919: Germany receives 100% war guilt clause
-Reparations: 31 Billion
• Germany: Destroyed
-Empire collapses
-Weimar Republic (shaky democracy)
-1920s Germany: starvation, $ worthless
• Middle East: An Afterthought
• Allies promise both Arabs and Jews states
• So Hitler launches Nazism
-Undo humiliation of Versailles step by
step
- “Stab in the Back”: Jews
Jews became the Nazi’s
Scapegoat
-Crush Bolshevism
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
• 1921: Becomes leader of Nazi Party
The “Aryan” “Race”
Mein Kamph, published in 1925
Nazi Germany
• 1933: Nazis take power
Hitler “democratically” became Chancellor
• 1934: Hitler secretly tells officials to set up
for war
Hitler with President
Hindenburg, 1933
BUT: Hitler is seen by public as a peacemaker
• Brits allowed Hitler to take back land until he
invaded Poland
• 1936 Olympics held in Germany
• Hitler allied with England and Italy from
1933-39
• No western powers really cared about the Jews
1935 Nuremberg Laws
• Jews stripped of citizenship
• Intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles prohibited
-Jews punished by death
• 1930s (Pre-war) Nazi policy:
-Encouraged exodus of Jews but nobody
wanted them
= Elimination policies begin in 1939
• The Nuremberg Laws become basis of Apartheid in
South Africa
ALL FURTHER PERSECUTION / MURDER UNDER THESE
LAWS WAS NOW LEGAL
• 1937-38: Hitler shed peacemaker image
• March 1938: Unite Germany with Austria, then
Czechoslovakia
- “Rescue” German minority
• Sept. 29, 1938: Munich Agreement: A story of
Appeasement
-British PM Chamberlain: avoid war at all
costs = hands Czechoslovakia over
-Germany sees Hitler as hero: “frees”
Germans in Czechoslovakia but avoids war
Campaign of Terror
November 9-10, 1938: the Night of Broken Glass
(Kristallnacht)
• All of Germany’s 275 synagogues destroyed
• Thousands of Jews arrested, women beaten, 25,000
men sent to concentration camps
• 91 Jews murdered
• Result: Large scale emigration (100,000
Jews)…250,000 remain in Germany
Why didn’t more Jews leave?
Kristallnacht
Local residents watch the burning of the ceremonial hall at the Jewish cemetery in Graz
during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). Graz, Austria, November 9-10, 1938.
KENNKARTE
This is a photograph of a German internal identity card. German Jews were forced to carry these cards as
of January 1, 1939. This card was issued to Ellen Wertheimer in June 1939 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She
was deported from Germany to a ghetto called Terezin, in Czechoslovakia, on November 15, 1942. She kept the
card with her throughout the war and preserved it.
Locale:
Pforzheim, [Baden] Germany
Date:
Saturday, February 04, 1939
Identification card issued to Moritz Israel Hamburger
Germany, 1939
He perished the following year in the Gurs concentration camp.
Hitler-Stalin Pact
August 23, 1939
• 10 year non-aggression pact
• Secret agreement to divide Poland
-Stalin to get control of Baltic States
• 1941: Hitler attacks Russia
= Two front war
• February 2, 1942: Battle of Stalingrad
-Secure Allied victory
The Inaction of the West
• 1939-41: Concern is the war
-Knew about machine gunning, etc.
• 1942: West knew about death camps
• Pope: feared Hitler would target Catholics
The West did nothing
D-Day: June 6, 1944
• Americans, British, Commonwealth, and free French
troops from Normandy; others from the
Mediterranean
• Germany bombed relentlessly
• Hitler goes insane; retreats to bunker
• April 30, 1945: Hitler shoots himself to avoid falling
into Russian hands
Hitler’s Hierarchy
1. Heinrich Himmler
2. Reinhard Heydrich
3. Hermann Goering
4. Joseph Goebbels
5. Adolf Eichmann
Heinrich Himmler
• Head of Gestapo and S.S.
• Minister of the Interior from
1943 to 1945
• The “architect” of the
Holocaust: supervised
day-to-day killings
Reinhard Heydrich
• Commander of the Einstatzgruppen
• Was appointed Reich Protector of
Bohemia-Moravia
-power to crush resistance in
Czechoslovakia and send Jews
to camps
Hermann Goering
• President of the Reichstag,
Prime Minister of Prussia
and, as Hitler's designated
successor, the second man in
the Third Reich
• Later blamed by Hitler for
Germany’s military defeats
Joseph GOEBBELS
• Propaganda minister
• Kristallnacht organizer
Adolf EICHMANN
• S.S. Lieutenant-Colonel
• Chief of Jewish office of Gestapo
• Implemented Final Solution
The Path to Nazi Genocide
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
http://www.ushmm.org/learn/introduction-to-theholocaust/path-to-nazi-genocide
PART II: The Shoah
Human remains found in the Dachau concentration camp
crematorium after liberation. Germany, April 1945
Autonomy of a Genocide
1939: Euthanasia Program:
250,000 Germans killed
-6 places for killing (Germany / Austria)
-Victims transported in buses with blacked out
windows
-gassed and burned
Canadian Link: sterilization in Alta. and B.C.
-Criminals, low IQs, handicapped,
Aboriginal youth
Ghettos
• Established to isolate “disease-spreading” Jews
• Initially for deportation to Madagascar
• NOT a conscious step to Final Solution
• Run by Jewish councils
• Starvation, disease = .5 million deaths
Lodz Ghetto
• The Germans isolated the ghetto from the rest of
Lodz with barbed-wire fencing.
• Special police units guarded the ghetto
perimeter.
• Internal order in the ghetto was the
responsibility of Jewish ghetto police.
• The ghetto area was divided into three parts.
• Streetcars for the non-Jewish population of Lodz
went through the ghetto but were not allowed
to stop within it.
Lodz Ghetto
May 1, 1940: Lodz ghetto sealed
-160,000 people inside less than 10
square blocks
Lodz Ghetto
• Historical footage from Lodz
DEPORTATIONS TO THE LODZ GHETTO
In 1941 and 1942, almost 40,000 Jews were
deported to the Lodz ghetto:
• 20,000 from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia, and Luxembourg,
• 20,000 from the smaller towns.
• About 5,000 Roma (Gypsies) from Austria
• In the spring of 1944, the Nazis destroyed the Lodz
ghetto.
• By then, Lodz was the last remaining ghetto in Poland,
with a population of approximately 75,000 Jews in May
1944.
• In June and July 1944 the Nazis deported 3,000 Jews to
Chelmno.
• Jews were told that they were being transferred to work
camps in Germany.
• The Germans deported the surviving ghetto residents to
the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in August
1944.
• “Give me your children”
Museum | Online Exhibitions | Voices from the Lodz Ghetto
• Holocaust Survivor Milton Belfer
Individual Record
http://tc.usc.edu/vhiechoes/video.aspx?testimonyid=22514
The Final Solution
• Hitler coins the “Final Solution to the Jewish
Problem / Question”
-Jews assimilating too well=
“Jewish Problem”
• Summer 1941: Plan for mass murder of Jews
-Hitler gives verbal order
-September: Zyclone B tested at Auschwitz (gas
chambers under construction)
-October: mass deportation of German Jews to
Poland
-Thousands shot on arrival
1941: Einsatzgruppen
-December 8: mobile killing units begin operating
in Poland
-3,000 men in 4 killing squads follow army into
Russia
-1.5 million Jews are shot face-to-face
• January 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference
-Plan Final Solution (Endloesung)
• An Invitation to Mass Murder:
July 13, 1942: 1,500 Jews shot in one day
• May 12, 1943: After one month resistance, Warsaw
ghetto liquidated
• All ghettos in Poland liquidated; Jews sent to death camps
On display at the United Nations, New York
1944:
Hungarian
Jews the last
group to be
taken to
Auschwitz
• "Final Solution“
Interviews describing gas chambers at Auschwitz
• November 28, 1944: Last gassings at Auschwitz
-Himmler orders the chambers be destroyed
January 1945: Death
Marches
-From the East to
Germany
-Prisoners forcedmarched; shot if out
of line
-Most fell apart; S.S.
fled
-Why do it?
• January 28, 1945: Soviets liberate Auschwitz
Yalta Conference, Feb. 1945
• April 1945: England and America liberates
German camps
• May 8, 1945: Germany surrenders
Aftermath of Hitler’s War
German soldiers in the Soviet Union during a December 1943 Soviet offensive on the eastern front.
German troops invaded Soviet territory in June 1941 but faced counteroffensives following the battle of
Stalingrad. December 16, 1943.
Cold War
• Begins immediately after WWII
-Threat of Communism
-Stalin now dominates Eastern and Balkan
Europe
• East / West Berlin
Nuremberg Trials 1945-1946
• Allies had two jobs:
1. Punish Nazi criminals
2. Undo Nazi ideology / pave way for democracy
Nuremberg Trials 1945-1946
• Trial of 22 Nazi leaders
-Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels committed
suicide
-Hermann Goering war highest-ranking Nazi to
face justice: sentenced to death but escaped by
committing suicide
Nuremberg Trials 1945-1946
• Many Nazis swore loyalty to Stalin = escape
punishment
• Who exactly was a Nazi? Proof?
State of Israel
• Direct result of Holocaust
• Re-established in 1948
-U.N. and Soviet Union vote to give land to Jews
= Jewish / Arab war
-Arab denial of Holocaust
Survivors
Never Again?
Sources
Information:
Dr. Catherine Chatterley, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust course
notes; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Pictures:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jewish Virtual Library,
German Propaganda Archive.