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The Holocaust
Chapter 16
Section 3
Main Idea
• During the Holocaust,
Hitler’s Nazis killed six
million Jews and five
million other “nonAryans”.
• 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IE_countries.svg
• 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.