Download The Holocaust

Anti -Semitism
This is the term given to
political, social and
economic agitation against
Jews. In simple terms it
means ‘Hatred of Jews’.
Aryan Race
This was the name of what Hitler
believed was the perfect race. These
were people with full German blood,
blonde hair and blue eyes.
For hundreds of years Christian Europe had regarded the Jews as the Christ -killers. At one
time or another Jews had been driven out of almost every European country. The way
they were treated in England in the thirteenth century is a typical example.
In 1275 they were made to wear a yellow badge.
In 1287 269 Jews were hanged in the Tower of London.
This deep prejudice against Jews was still strong in the twentieth century, especially in
Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe, where the Jewish population was very large.
After the First World War hundreds of Jews were blamed for the defeat in the War.
Prejudice against the Jews grew during the economic depression which followed. Many
Germans were poor and unemployed and wanted someone to blame. They turned on the
Jews, many of whom were rich and successful in business.
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Nuremberg Laws- Laws that denied German
citizenship to Jews, banned marriages
between Jews and non-Jews and segregated
Jews at every level of society.

Wanted the “Final Solution” to get rid of
Jews.
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Propaganda produced intended to turn
people against Jews.
Pre-war German
Propaganda
Anti-Jewish propaganda book
"The Poisonous Mushroom”
Germany, c. 1938.
Nazi propaganda photo depicts friendship between an
"Aryan" and a black woman. The caption states: "The
result! A loss of racial pride."

“Night of the Broken Glass”

Attacks on Jews in Germany, Austria and the
Sudetenland.

Secret police and military units destroyed
more than 1500 synagogues and 7500 Jewish
owned businesses, killed more than 200 Jews
and injured more than 600. Thousands were
arrested.

Between 1933 and 1937 about 129,000 Jews
fled Germany and Austria. (including Albert
Einstein)

Because of the worldwide depression in the
1930s many Jews were not welcome in other
countries.

Many were sent back to where they came
from.
Place where a groups of people were confined.
Usually not designed to kill but rather make the
members useful in the Third Reich.
Tattooed numbers on arms and dressed in striped
uniforms.
Different colors worn by different groups.
ex. Pink=homosexuals, Jews= yellow, red=
political prisoners.

Many killed by unrestricted guards.

Starvation and disease was a problem

Medical experiments were also known to
happen.

Mentally ill, too old, too young, and crippled
were usually immediately sent to death.
A prisoner in a
compression chamber loses
consciousness (and later
dies) during an experiment
to determine altitudes at
which aircraft crews could
survive without oxygen.
Dachau, Germany, 1942.
A Romani (Gypsy) victim of Nazi medical experiments to
make seawater potable. Dachau concentration camp,
Germany, 1944.
Percentage of Jews killed in each country
A MAP OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEATH CAMPS USED BY THE NAZIS.

Part of Hitler’s “Final Solution”

Plan was to exterminate 11,000,000 Jews.

Death camps are where individuals are taken to by
exterminated (killed).

Auschwitz= Most well known

Victims were gassed, shot to death, and bodies were
burned or buried in mass graves.

Included Jews, Catholics, prisoners of war,
homosexuals, anyone opposing Hitler.
16 of the 44 children taken
from a French children’s
home.
They were sent to a
concentration camp and later
to Auschwitz.
ONLY 1 SURVIVED
A group of children at
a concentration camp
in Poland.
Part of a stockpile of Zyklon-B poison gas pellets
found at Majdanek death camp.
Before poison gas was used , Jews were
gassed in mobile gas vans. Carbon
monoxide gas from the engine’s exhaust
was fed into the sealed rear compartment.
Victims were dead by the time they
reached the burial site.
Smoke rises as the
bodies are burnt.
Jewish women, some holding infants, are forced to wait in a line
before their execution by Germans and Ukrainian collaborators.
A German policeman shoots individual Jewish women who remain alive
in the ravine after the mass execution.
Portrait of two-yearold Mania Halef, a
Jewish child who was
among the 33,771
persons shot by the
SS during the mass
executions at Babi
Yar, September,
1941.
Nazis sift through a huge pile of clothes
left by victims of the massacre.
Two year old Mani Halef’s clothes are somewhere amongst these.
Bales of hair shaven
from women at
Auschwitz, used to
make felt-yarn.
After liberation, an Allied
soldier displays a stash of
gold wedding rings taken
from victims at Buchenwald.
In 1943, when the number of murdered Jews exceeded 1 million. Nazis ordered the bodies of
those buried to be dug up and burned to destroy all traces.
Soviet POWs at forced labor in 1943 exhuming bodies in the ravine at Babi Yar, where the Nazis
had murdered over 33,000 Jews in September of 1941.

U.S. could have helped if we let more Jewish
people come in to the country.

Why didn’t we help? Great Depression, AntiSemitism, underestimation of Hitler.

War Refugee Board- 1944 FDR= saved
thousands of Jews.

Stalin showed no concern about what Hitler
was doing.

Camps were not military targets. We
concentrated on defeating Hitler, not helping
victims.

Soldiers were unprepared for what they saw at
the camps.

Many Americans did not realize the extent of the
problem until after the camps were liberated.

Many Jews found refuge or home in the U.S.

President Truman immediately recognized the
New Nation of Israel in 1948.
 Holocaust refers specifically to the
Jewish/Undesirables Genocide we have presented
today
 Genocide - mass murder of a group of people
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1988 Kurdish genocide in Turkey and Iraq
1990 Rwandan genocide in Africa
1991 – 1995 Bosnian genocide in Europe
May we never let it happen again…