Download The Holocaust

The Nazi Holocaust
Extermination of the Jews
The Holocaust
 “Only after we assimilate the history of the
Holocaust can we transform the future.”
 Alan Rosenberg, Professor of Philosophy,
Queens College
What was the Holocaust?
 State sponsored, systematic persecution of
European Jews by Nazi Germany genocide
 From the Greek word meaning “a sacrifice
by burning”
 In Hebrew, the term “shoah” is used,
meaning catastrophe
The Holocaust Was Unique
 The first time a government tried to get rid of a religious
group throughout an entire continent
 The first time technology had been used for such
destructive purposes, so that 10,000 Jews a day were
“processed” by Auschwitz, a death camp, at its peak
 The first time a government used its brightest and best
people to kill millions
 The first time that propaganda in film, schools, public
rallies, radio, newspapers, art, and literature had been
used to dehumanize a group of people
Racism + Social Darwinism
 At the end of the 19th
century, racism
combined with Social
Darwinism and
created ideas similar to
those Hitler would
support
Racial Superiority
 In Mein Kampf (1925),
Hitler described a racial
hierarchy with:
 Aryans (the cultureproducing race) at the top
 The “master race”
 Blonde hair, blue eyes
 Jews, Africans, and
Gypsies (the culturedestroying races) at the
bottom.
Victims
“It is true that not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.” – Elie Wiesel
Jews
Political Opponents
Habitual Criminals
Handicapped
Homosexuals
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Roma & Sinti (Gypsies) Poles
Freemasons
Immigrants
Soviet P.O.W.’s
American P.O.W.’s
African-Germans
Inferior Peoples v. Aryan Volk
 In his speeches, Hitler
played on fears that
Germans would one
day be outnumbered
by inferior peoples
and idealized a time
when the Aryan
"Volk" lived in
harmony
Goal: Remove Inferior Types
 Hitler's goal was to remove
the inferior types from
Germany, making more
lebensraum (living space)
for the superior Aryans.
 The Jews were the special
object of his hatred and
became the scapegoat.
 The Gestapo were the Nazi
secret police responsible
for finding Jews.
The Racial Hygiene Movement
 The Racial Hygiene
Movement (RHM), which
began in Germany in 1905,
had few supporters until the
Nazis came to power.
 “Only through [the Führer]
did our dream of …
applying racial hygiene to
society become a reality.”
-- Ernst Rüdin - Nazi psychiatrist
Euthanasia
 The RHM advocated the
removal of those who would
not improve the German race
and had no use in society –
those who Hitler called the
"useless eaters."
 This meant killing the
mentally ill, the terminally ill,
and the physically and
mentally handicapped. They
euphemistically called this
"euthanasia."
Physical Measurements
 The Nazi Bureau for
Enlightenment on
Population Policy and
Racial Welfare
recommended the
classification of Aryans
and non-Aryans on the
basis of measurements of
the skull and other physical
features.
The War Against the Jews
“How can such a monstrous crime as the Holocaust occur? It begins when people start
thinking of themselves as ‘us’ and of others as ‘them.’ – Ted Gottfried
 Nazis had two goals:
 Social death of Jews
 Removal of Jewish
presence from German
society
 When the Nazis began
to wage war against the
Jews, they used rhetoric
and propaganda.
From an anti-Semitic children's
book. The sign reads "Jews are not
wanted here"
The Wandering Jew
 On November 8, 1937, a
propaganda exhibit entitled
Der Ewige Jude (The
Wandering Jew) opened. It
portrayed Jews as
communists and swindlers.
 Over 150,000 people
attended the exhibit in just
three days.
Communists and Thieves
 Jews were frequently
associated with
communists and thieves.
The Wandering Jew
later became a notorious
hate film, and associated
the Jews with rats and
other vermin.
The headlines say "Jews are our
misfortune" and "How the Jew
cheats." Germany, 1936.
Extermination
 For those with ears to
hear, Hitler promised
the extermination of
the Jewish people in a
speech to the
Reichstag
 "...if the international Jewish financiers in
and outside Europe should succeed in
plunging the nations once more into a world
war, then the result will not be the
Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the
victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the
Jewish race in Europe!"
-- Adolf Hitler, January 30, 1939
Harassment
 Harassment followed
the limitations on the
civil rights of Jewish
citizens.
Jewish children humiliated in the classroom.
Registration
 At first, Jews were
required to register
and to wear yellow
stars (the Star of
David) as
identification.
The Jewish Badge
Belgium
France
Germany, Alsace,
Bohemia-Moravia Holland
Parts of Greece,
Serbia, Belgrade, Sofia
(armband)
Romania
Parts of
Bulgaria
(a button)
Part of Slovakia
Parts of Bulgaria,
Poland, Hungary,
Greece, Lithuania,
Latvia
Parts of Poland,
East & Upper Silesia
The Nuremberg Race Laws
 The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935:
 Deprived Jews of rights of citizenship
 Prohibited Jewish marriage to Aryans
 Prohibited employment of Aryans as household
help
 The Nuremberg Race Laws included:
 "The Law for the Protection of German Blood
and German Honor”
 prohibited German- Jewish intermarriage
 "The Reich Citizenship Law”
 designated Jews as subjects
 "The Law for the Protection of the Genetic
Health of the German People”
 required potential marriage partners to submit to a
medical examination
 If they were disease free, they would be issued a
"Certificate of Fitness to Marry."
 The certificate was required in order to get a
marriage license.
Laws Restricting Personal Rights
Jews were only permitted to purchase
products between 3-5 p.m. This was
one step in the overall Nazi scheme of
eliminating Jews from economic, social
and cultural life.
Bench with inscription “Only for Jews.”
Sign on a phone
booth in Munich
prohibiting Jews
from using the
public telephone.
Sign forbidding Jews in
public pool.
Jews are forced to walk in the street.
The original photo caption read, "Jews in gutter."
Belgium, 1943
Laws Restricting Occupation
With the rise of Nazism, nothing the Jews had done for their country
made any difference… - Alfred Gottschalk, Jewish Survivor
Erich
Remarque,
author.
Albert Einstein,
Nobel Prize
winner.
Sigmund
Freud,
psychoanalyst,
Otto Klemperer,
conductor.
Boycott of Jewish Shops
April 1, 1933
Soldiers stood at the entrances to Jewish shops and professional offices
discouraging non-Jewish patrons from entering.
Signs were posted warning: “Germans! Beware! Don’t Buy from Jews!”
Nazi Propaganda
The Hitler Youth
GIRLS
German Girl’s League,
Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM)
BOYS
Hitler Youth, Hitlerjügend (HJ)
"Youth Serves the Fuëhrer. “All girls join us.”
All ten-year-olds join the
Hitler Youth."
Typical School Day
The teacher begins and ends the
instruction by leading the assembled
students in the greeting:
The teacher raises the right arm and
declares “Heil Hitler.”
The students raise their right arms and
respond Heil Hitler.”
Raising the Swastika Flag at a
school in Berlin.
Changes in the Curriculum
Math Problems Twisted to Promote Nazi Ideology
According to careful estimates
there are 300,000 mentally
ill persons, epileptics, etcetera in
long-term care facilities in
Germany.
What is the total yearly cost of
their care assuming daily costs
of 4 RM per person?
How many marriage loans for
1,000 RM each could be made
yearly with this money?
The Jews are aliens in
Germany.
In 1933 there were
66,060,000 inhabitants of
the German Reich, of
whom 499,682 were
Jews.
What is the percentage of
aliens?
Popular children’s board game, “Juden Raus!” (Jews Out).
By throwing dice, the winner manages to get six Jews out of their homes and businesses (the circles)
and on the road to Palestine. It sold over a million copies in 1938, when Nazi policy was forced
Jewish emigration.
Kristallnacht
“I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th
century civilization.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
 During the evening of November 9, 1938,
the "night of broken glass," many Jewish
businesses, synagogues and homes were
destroyed by mobs of people fired by
propaganda and fueled by their own
prejudice and ignorance.
 Kristallnacht was a massive coordinated
attack throughout the German Reich.
The burning of a synagogue during Kristallnacht
In Retaliation for Nazi Mistreatment
 The attack came after Herschel
Grynszpan, a 17 year old Jew
living in Paris, shot and killed
a member of the German
Embassy in retaliation for the
poor treatment his father and
his family suffered at the
hands of the Nazis. His family,
along with thousands of other
Jews, had been transported in
boxcars and dumped at the
Polish border.
“Rise in Bloody Vengence”
 The German propaganda
minister, Joseph Goebbels,
incited Germans to "rise in
bloody vengeance against
the Jews.
 Mob violence broke out as
the German police stood by
and watched.
 Storm troopers and members
of the SS beat and murdered
Jews along with the mobs.
 Nearly 1000 synagogues
were burned and thousands
of Jews rounded up.
Synagogues burned on the night of Kristallnacht
Jews Sent to Concentration Camps, November 10, 1938
Ghettos
 Jewish people were
herded into ghettos
(walled off parts of the
city in which the
people could be more
easily controlled).
Joseph Goebbels
called the ghettos
"death boxes"
Waiting for a drink of water in the Warsaw
Ghetto, where water and food were in
short supply.
The Ghettos
 Definition: any section of a city or town in which members of
a minority group live or are restricted by economics or
discrimination.
 The first ghetto was established in Venice in 1516 when the
Church ordered that walls be built around the Jewish Quarter.
 The word “ghetto” means “foundry” or “iron works.” In
Venice, the ghetto was near a foundry that produced cannon
balls.
 The establishment of ghettos was the first step in the Nazi
extermination plan for the Jews of Eastern Europe. They
served as assembly and collection points for Jews.
Over 800 ghettos were established by the Nazis in Eastern Europe.
Jews at forced labor
constructing the wall
around the Krakow ghetto.
1941
Polish and Jewish laborers
construct a section of the wall
that separated the Warsaw ghetto
from the rest of the city.
Communal kitchen for
children, Warsaw Ghetto.
Burials, a part of daily life.
Jews using a wooden bridge to cross from one
section of the Lodz Ghetto to the other.
Street scene, Warsaw Ghetto.
Conditions
With little food and
diseases rampant in
the crowded ghettos,
the living conditions
became unbearable.
Food ration card.
This ration card from October 1941 entitled a resident to 300
calories a day.
Children climbing the walls to smuggle food into the Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising April - May 1943
Deportations
A child’s drawing showing a
German soldier shooting at a
train of deportees.
A 1942 transport to
Treblinka.
Corpses lie in an open railcar at
“Im Wagon”
(In the Railway Car)
by Ella LiebermannShiber
Concentration Camps
 In the next phase of the
"final solution," Nazis
separated out the young,
the old, and the ill and sent
them to their deaths.
 The gas chamber was used
in the extermination camps
such as Auschwitz.
 Those who could work
obtained only a temporary
reprieve.
Inmates at Sachenhausen wearing
identifying badges
Types of Concentration Camps
• Labor Camps
•Located mostly
in Germany
•Extermination
(death) Camps
•Mainly in
Poland
•Large Jewish
population
•In a central
location
•Rural
Extermination Camps
100,000
Victims
Camp
Deaths
Survivors
Auschwitz-Birkenau
1.1 – 1.6 million
7,000
Belzec *
434,500
2
Chelmno
152,000
2
Majdanek
170-235,000
<600
Sobibor *
> 167,000
50
Treblinka *
870,000-925,000
<100
Arrival
Entrance to
Auschwitz I
Entrance to Auschwitz II
(Birkenau)
Jews on “the ramp”
Selection
Men on the
right.
Women & children on the
left.
Those “fit” for work were
registered as prisoners.
Those “unfit” for work were
exterminated.
Around us, everyone was
weeping. Someone began to
recite the Kaddish, the prayer
for the dead. I do not know if it
has ever happened before, in
the long history of the Jews,
that people have ever recited
the prayer for the dead for
themselves.
- Elie Wiesel in Night, recalling what he
experienced as a teenager fresh off the
transport train at Auschwitz, 1944.
Unable to Work by David Olère.
Registration
They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will
have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so
that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. –
Primo Levi, Survival at Auschwitz
Registration: Camp Badges
Political
Jewish
Political
F
Political
(French)
Criminal
Jewish
Criminal
Antisocial
Jewish
Antisocial
Homosexual
Jewish
Homosexual
Emigrant
Jehovah’s
Witness
Gypsy
Jewish
Emigrant
P
Political
(Polish)
Political
Second-Time
Offender
Wehrmacht
Prisoner
Penal
Company
Prisoner Under
Special Surveillance
Living Conditions
 Led to dehumanization – taking away
someone’s individuality; making them less
human
Barracks
Six people slept on a plank of wood, on top of us another layer. And if
one of us had to turn, all the others had to turn because it was so narrow.
One cover, no pillow, no mattress.
- Alice Lok, Survivor
Barracks at Auschwitz
Roll Call
Life is not important at the roll call. Numbers are important.
Numbers tally.
- Salmen Gradowski, Auschwitz Survivor
Amidst a Nightmare of Crime
Food
A fortnight after my arrival, I already had the prescribed hunger, that
chronic hunger unknown to free men, which makes one dream at night,
and settles in all the limbs of one’s body. - Primo Levi, Survival at
Auschwitz
A DAY’S RATIONS
Breakfast
2 cups coffee or tea
(often nothing more than
dried leaves or bark,usually
birch, in hot water)
Midday
3 cups turnip and potato
soup, a scrap of meat or
extract) added
Avo (yeast
Evening
of
10 oz. of bread,
less than 1 oz. sausage
or cheese, and a teaspoon
margarine and beet jam
Slave Labor
Leaving for Work by David Olère.
Camp inmates are marched out to work past
victims of Nazi camp discipline.
Buna Factory,
Auschwitz III
(Monowitz).
Jewish women pulling cars of quarried stones,
Plaszlow, 1944.
Assembly line at
the Bavarian
Motor Works
(BMW) aircraft
engine factory,
Allach, Germany.
Survival
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too,
can be given to one only by other human beings. - Elie Wiesel
Prisoner throwing himself onto an
electrified fence, Mauthausen.
“Muselmann”
German term describing
prisoners who were near
death due to exhaustion,
starvation or hopelessness.
Medical Experiments
Survivor shows scar of a
wound deliberately
infected with dirt,
bacteria and slivers of
glass.
Low pressure
experimentation
resulting in death
from burst lungs.
Immersed in freezing water at Dachau. Medical experiment at Buchenwald.
Children victims of Nazi medical experiments
Jewish prisoners are loaded onto the train from Westerbork, a transit camp, on
their way to a concentration camp
The Final Solution
 In January 1942 high Nazi officials met to
discuss the "final solution of the Jewish
question," in the Berlin suberb, Wansee.
Known as the Wansee Conference, this
meeting did not begin the killing of the
Jews, but in it the Nazis articulated their
plans clearly and determined on a
systematic method to carry them out.
Extermination
Women and children awaiting the gas chambers in the “Little Wood”
adjacent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II (Birkenau).
The final destination for those who could not work, the gas
chamber. This is the gas chamber at Flossenburg.
Gassings
SS camp guards
with
Zyklon-B
canisters.
Gas chamber
in
Crematorium
I, Auschwitz I.
The camp orchestra played to calm fears
en route to the gas chambers.
We acknowledge receipt of your
order for five triple furnaces,
including two electric elevators
for raising the corpses and one
emergency elevator.
Contract acceptance letter,
J.A. Topf & Sons
Crematorium I
The first killing center was located at Auschwitz I. It was built partially
underground and housed a primitive gas chamber along with several
crematory ovens.
View of the walled entrance.
April 1945.
Note the small access lids in the roof through which Zyklon-B crystals
were dropped.
Metal slide for
placing bodies into
oven.
Crematory as found at
liberation.
Artwork by Jan
Komski,
survivor.
The Value of a Life
Rings
These shoes represent one day's
collection at the peak of the gassings,
about twenty-five thousand pairs.
Calculation by the SS of Profit Value in the Utilization of
Prisoners in the Concentration Camps
Official SS Document, March 11, 1941 Daily “farming-out” wage, average
6.00 Reichsmark, RM
Food, daily
<0.60> RM
Clothing depreciation
<0.10> RM
Balance
5.30 RM / day
Approximate life span
X 9 month (270 days)
NET PROFIT
1,431.00 RM / prisoner
Efficient utilization of prisoner’s body,
i.e. dental gold, clothing, valuables, money
202.00 RM
Cremation cost
<2.00> RM
AVERAGE NET PROFIT
200.00 RM
TOTAL PROFIT AFTER 9 MONTHS
1631.00 RM
Plus additional revenue from utilization of bones and ashes.
(1941: 1 RM = $.40, or 2.5 RM = $1.00)
-
We say ‘hunger,’ we say ‘tiredness,’ ‘fear,’ ‘pain,’ we say
‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free
words, created and used by free men who lived in
comfort and suffering in their homes. If the (camps) had
lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been
born; and only this language could express what it
means to toil the whole day in the wind with the
temperature below freezing, and wearing only a shirt,
underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body
nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end
drawing nearer.
- Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
Liberation
 In 1945 the camps were liberated. In the last
days, the Nazis were still unwilling to give
up the plan to exterminate the Jews. They
either executed Jews in the camps as they
abandoned them, death-marched them into
the interior of Germany, or cut off food and
water, leaving them to die.
Death Marches
As the Allied armies closed in
on the Nazi concentration
camps, every effort was made
to conceal the crimes that had
been committed.
Camps were dismantled or
abandoned. In the dead of
winter, prisoners were taken by
train and/or foot toward the
heartland of Germany with
hopes of preserving the slave
labor force for the Reich.
Thousands froze to death or
died.
“Death March” by Ella Liebermann Shiber
Dachau, Germany
Camp prisoners marching through a
village.
Photo was taken through upstairs
window of a private home along the
route. Few civilians gave aid to
prisoners on the death marches.
April 1945, Dachau, Germany.
Liberation
We are free, but how will we live our lives without our families. - Anton
Mason, Survivor
Survivors eagerly pull down
the Nazi eagle over entrance
to the Mauthausen.
Survivors in Allach, a
sub-camp of Dachau,
greet arriving U.S. troops.
C
O
N
D
I
T
I
O
N
S
Survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size
prisoner jackets.
Jewish survivors at Ebensee gathered
outside on the day after liberation.
Survivor sitting outside a barrack,
Bergen-Belsen, April 1945.
Young survivors at Buchenwald,
April 1945.
F
O
O
D
♦
M
E
D
I
C
I
N
Survivors, too weak to eat solid food,
suck on sugar cubes to give them
strength.
The sick are evacuated to an
American field hospital.
Survivors in Dachau distribute bread to
their comrades after liberation.
American medical personnel at work
in a typhus ward in a hospital for
survivors.
Children at Auschwitz. The lucky ones were liberated in 1945.
Mass grave site at Bergen-Belsen. The British found many dead
when they liberated the camp.
Poland
88%
2,900,000
Soviet Union
Hungary
Romania
Lithuania
Germany
Netherlands
Bohemia & Moravia
France
Latvia
Slovakia
Greece
Yugoslavia
Austria
Belgium
Italy
Luxembourg
Estonia
Norway
Denmark
Finland
Albania
Bulgaria
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
33%
70%
35%
90%
27%
75%
84%
24%
75%
76%
80%
72%
27%
44%
20%
50%
33%
55%
1.3%
2.8%
0
0
0
0
0
1,000,000
550,000
271,000
140,000
134,500
100,000
78,150
77,320
70,000
68,000
60,000
56,200
50,000
28,900
7,680
1,950
1,500
762
60
7
0
0
0
0
0
Jewish Losses
TOTAL : 5,596,029 (6 million)*
* These are minimum losses as reported by
Yehuda Bauer and Robert Rozett, "Estimated
Jewish Losses in the Holocaust," in Encyclopedia of
the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990),
p.1799.
The estimated number of Jewish
fatalities during the Holocaust is
usually given between 5.1 and 6
million victims. Despite the
availability of numerous
scholarly works and archival
sources on the subject,
Holocaust related figures may
never be definitely known.
Nuremberg Trials
 1945 – 1946
 22 Nazi leaders were charged with “crimes
against humanity”
 This showed the world that behavior like this
was unacceptable
 Ten Nazi leaders were hanged, and their
bodies were burned at a concentration camp
Nuremberg Trials
Nov. 20, 1945 – Oct. 1, 1946
Palace of Justice in Nuremberg.
Front: Hermann Goering, Rudolf
Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and
Wilhelm Keitel.
The defendants at Nuremberg.
Julius Streicher,
Editor-in-Chief of
Stürmer.
Front: Rudolf Hess, Joachim von
Der Ribbentrop Back: Karl Doenitz, Erich
Raeder and Balder von Schirach.
I am entirely normal. Even while I was doing this extermination work, I led a normal family life and
so on…Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even
occurred to us. And besides, it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame
for everything … You can be sure that it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses
and smell the continual burning. But Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity
and I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity …
For me as an old fanatic National Socialist, I took It all as fact – just as a Catholic believes in his
Church dogma. It was just truth without questions; I had no doubt about that … That was the picture
I had in my head, so when Himmler called me to him I just accepted it as the realization of something
I had already accepted – not only I, but everybody. I took it so much for granted that … this crass
order to exterminate thousands of people (I did not know then how many) – even though it did
frighten me momentarily – it fitted in with all that had been preached to me for years. The problem
itself, the extermination of Jewry, was not new – but only that I was to be the one to carry it out,
frightened me at first. But after getting the clear direct order and even an explanation with it – there
was nothing left but to carry it out … Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about
these things; it never occurred to us … We were all so much trained to obey orders without even
thinking, that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody, and
somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t.
Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, sentenced to death &
hung at Auschwitz.
(From: Gilbert, G.M. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Company, 1947, pp. 258-59)
References
 Adapted from Holocaust Nightmare: A
HistoryWiz Exhibit