Download THE Holocaust PP - Granada Hills Charter High School

Compiled by Barbara Kellogg
Edited by L. Kleinberg
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Jews. The main group targeted by the Nazis for extermination or “Genocide”
(The deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, cultural, or
religious group).
Gypsies: A collective term for Romani and Sinti. A nomadic people believed to
have come originally from northwest India. They became divided into five main
groups still extant today. By the sixteenth century, they had spread to every
country of Europe. Alternately welcomed and persecuted since the fifteenth
century, they were considered enemies of the state by the Nazis and persecuted
relentlessly. Approximately 500,000 Gypsies are believed to have perished in the
gas chambers.
Jehovah's Witnesses: Religious sect that originated in the United States and had
about 2,000 members in Germany in 1933. Their religious beliefs did not allow
them to swear allegiance to any worldly power making them enemies of the Nazi
state.
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POWs – prisoners of war
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Mentally ill people
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Criminals
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In the beginning of the systematic mass murder of
Jews, Nazis used mobile killing squads called
Einsatzgruppen.
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The Einsatzgruppen consisted of four units of between 500 and
900 men.
Each which followed the invading German troops into the
Soviet Union.
By the time Himmler ordered a halt to the shooting in the fall of
1942, they had murdered approximately 1,500,000 Jews.
The death camps proved to be a better, faster, less
personal method for killing Jews, one that would spare
the shooters, not the victims, emotional anguish.
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Concentration camps were prisons used without regard to
accepted norms of arrest and detention. They were an essential
part of Nazi systematic oppression.
1933-36 - they were used primarily for political prisoners.
1936-42 - expanded and non-political prisoners--Jews, Gypsies,
homosexuals, and Poles were also incarcerated.
 1942-45 – prisoners forced to work in the armament industry, as more
and more Germans were fighting in the war.
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 Living conditions varied considerably from camp to camp and over time.
 The worst conditions took place from 1936-42, especially after the war broke
out.
 Death, disease, starvation, crowded and unsanitary conditions, and torture
were a daily part of concentration camps.
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Death Camps were Nazi extermination centers where Jews and
other victims were brought to be killed as part of Hitler's Final
Solution.
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Chelmno – 1st extermination camp with mass killings 150,000 Jews
were murdered technologically primitive, employing carbon
monoxide gas vans as the main method of killing.
Treblinka – Largest of the three Operation Reinhard killing
centers. Between 700,000 and 900,000 persons were killed (750,000
Jews)
Sobibor – 1 of 3 Reinhard killing centers, 250,000 Jews were killed
there
Belzec 600,000 Jews were murdered there were established as part
of Aktion Reinhard
Auschwitz - Birkenau (Auschwitz II) Largest concentration/death
camp, killed 6,000 people daily, 1 1/2 million Jews and 1 million
non-Jews murdered
Majdanek (also called Lublin), At first a labor camp for Poles and
a POW camp for Russians, but then converted to a death camp.
50,000 Jews killed
►Brown = Gypsy
►Violet = Jehovah's Witness
►Pink = Homosexual
►Green = Habitual Criminal
►Red
= Political prisoner
►Black = Asocial
►Blue = Emigrant
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Euthanasia Program - The killing of 90,000 mentally and
chronically ill persons.
Sterilization - between 1933 and 1937, of 200,000 young men and
women who were found to be suffering from supposedly genetic
diseases.
Departments for genetic research and for genetic, anthropological,
and genealogical surveys of the entire non - German population to
which the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor was
applicable.
The purpose was to identify those individuals who qualified as being
of "pure Aryan" blood.
 The medical experiments fell into two broad categories:
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(1) experiments whose objectives were compatible with professional
medical ethics and the purposes of medical practice, but whose mode of
implementation violated moral law;
 (2) experiments whose very purposes violated medical ethic and which were
irreconcilable with the accepted norms of medical research.
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By the end of 1943 the Germans closed down the death camps
built specifically to exterminate Jews.
The death tolls for the camps are as follows:
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Treblinka (750,000 Jews)
Belzec, (550,000 Jews)
Sobibór, (200,000 Jews);
Chelmno, (150,000 Jews)
Lublin (also called Majdanek, 50,000 Jews)
Auschwitz continued to operate through the summer of 1944; its final
death total was about 1 million Jews and 1 million non-Jews.
Allied encirclement of Germany was nearly complete in the fall of
1944.
Nazis began dismantling the camps, hoping to cover up their
crimes.
By the late winter/early spring of 1945, they sent prisoners
walking to camps in central Germany.
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Thousands died in what became known as death marches.
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Those who attempted to rescue Jews and others from the Nazi death
sentence did so at great risk to their own safety.
Harboring a Jew = shot or publicly hanged as a warning to others
 Sharing scarce resources with those in hiding was an additional sacrifice
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Better known rescuers
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Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who led the effort that saved
100,000 Hungarian Jews in 1944
Oscar Schindler saved over 1,000 Polish Jews from their deaths
Huguenot Pastor André Trocme led the rescue effort in Le Chambon-surLignon, France, which hid and protected 5,000 Jews
In Denmark, 7,220 of its 8,000 Jews were saved by a citizenry who hid
them, then ferried them to the safety of neutral Sweden
Over 13,000 men and women who risked their lives to rescue Jews have
been honored as "Righteous Gentiles" at the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial in Jerusalem.
Thousands more remain unrecognized
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As Allied troops entered Nazi-occupied territories, the
final rescue and liberation transpired. Allied troops
who stumbled upon the concentration camps were
shocked at what they found. Large ditches filled with
bodies, rooms of baby shoes, and gas chambers with
fingernail marks on the walls all testified to Nazi
brutality. General Eisenhower insisted on
photographing and documenting the horror so that
future generations would not ignore history and repeat
its mistakes. He also forced villagers neighboring the
death and concentration camps to view what had
occurred in their own backyards.
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A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust at
http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/default.htm
The Simon Wiesenthal Center
Museum of Tolerance Online Multimedia
Learning Center at
http://motlc.learningcenter.wiesenthal.org/