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The Holocaust
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Holocaust
by Barbara Sonek
We played, we laughed
we were loved.
We were ripped from the arms of our
parents and thrown into the fire.
We were nothing more than children.
We had a future. We were going to be lawyers, rabbis, wives,
teachers, mothers. We had dreams, then we had no hope. We were
taken away in the dead of night like cattle in cars, no air to breathe
smothering, crying, starving, dying. Separated from the world to be
no more. From the ashes, hear our plea. This atrocity to mankind
can not happen again. Remember us, for we were the children
whose dreams and lives were stolen away.
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The Holocaust is the term used to
describe the persecution and mass murder
of millions of Jewish people in Europe
during World War II.
While the Nazis killed nearly 6 million Jews
they also persecuted Gypsies,
Homosexuals, and Slavic peoples, along
with other groups they saw as inferior
Hitler’s Policies
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Once Hitler gained power in Germany he began
to institute many of the idea’s he had presented
in his book Mein Kampf
Discrimination against Jews was very common in
Europe-often Jewish people were forced to live
in secluded ghettos and had many restrictions
on land ownership
However the Nazi’s would take these policies
much further-To them all Jews were EVIL no
matter what their religion, occupation or
education
Hitler’s Policies
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The Nazis under Hitler began to take away basic rights that had
been granted to Jewish people for centuries
The Nuremberg Laws took citizenship away from Jewish Germans
and banned marriage between Jews and other Germans. Other
laws defined Jews as any one with at least one Jewish grandparent
(Hitler) and prohibited them from holding public office or voting.
Jews with German sounding names were forced to change them to
Jewish names and there passports were marked with large red J’s to
signify their ethnicity.
By 1938 at least half of the German Jewish population was
unemployed-they were not allowed to own businesses, be doctors,
lawyers or any other type of service position
Despite these conditions many Jews remained in Germany, unwilling
to give up their lives they had fought so hard to establish-little did
they know the terror that was to come.
Kristallnacht
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In response to an enraged Jewish man killing a German official in
Paris-Hitler and his minister of propaganda-Joseph Goebbels
organized a series of attacks on Jewish people that seemingly
appeared to be public acts of retaliation
German storm troopers invaded Jewish homes in Poland and
Germany destroying property attacking families-these actions were
also carried out by roving bands of thugs.
The destruction and violence would become known as Kristallnacht
or the night of broken glass
At the nights end 7,500 businesses were destroyed, 180 synagogues
and 90 people were killed with hundreds of injured
Nazi interior minister Herman Goering added insult to injury by
stating that Jewish people had to pay for the damages stating they
were the reason for the destruction and violence-he would state-”I
would like to say that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.”
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After these violent events many German Jews
would leave the country-as many as 350,000
Jews escaped Nazi controlled Germany-including
scientist Albert Einstein
Thousands applied for visas everyday, but most
were denied
Most countries were not willing to take in these
immigrants
The United States had immigration quotas and
was not willing to raise them for people that
were literally leaving their homes with nothing
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Jewish people tried to escape to many
destinations in Central and South America
One example was the SS St. Louis that carried
930 Jewish passengers to Havana, Cuba-there
the immigration director-fueled by Nazi
propaganda refused to let the people stay-most
of these people were returned to European
countries that shortly fell under Nazi rule-most
of them would die in the Nazis FINAL SOLUTION
THE FINAL SOLUTION
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On January 20, 1942 Nazi leaders met at the
Wannsee Conference held in a Berlin suburb to
determine the “final solution for the Jewish
question”
Previous solutions had included rounding up
undesirable people, shooting them and pilling
them in mass graves
Another solution was loading them in trucks and
pumping in toxic fumes-both methods were
considered to slow and inefficient
Joseph Goebbels
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Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was
a German politician and Reich
Minister of Propaganda in Nazi
Germany from 1933 to 1945. As
one of Adolf Hitler's closest
associates and most devout
followers, he was known for his
zealous oratory and anti-Semitism.
He played a hand in the
Kristallnacht attack on the German
Jews, which historians consider to
be the beginning of the Final
Solution, leading towards the
genocide of the Holocaust.
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http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/
ww2era.htm
Josef Mengele
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Josef Rudolf Mengele also known as the
Angel of Death was a German SS officer
and a physician in the Nazi concentration
camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned
doctorates in anthropology from Munich
University and in medicine from Frankfurt
University. He initially gained notoriety for
being one of the SS physicians who
supervised the selection of arriving
transports of prisoners, determining who
was to be killed and who was to become a
forced labourer, but is far more infamous for
performing grisly human experiments on
camp inmates, including children, for which
Mengele was called the "Angel of Death".
THE FINAL SOLUTION
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The new plan called for
concentration camps that
were detention centers
were those that were
able would work until
they died of malnutrition,
disease or fatigue
The others including the
elderly, women and
children were sent to
extermination camps to
be executed in massive
gas chambers
THE FINAL SOLUTION
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The first concentration camps were
established in 1933 to jail political
enemies.
Buchenwald was one of the first and
largest-here men worked 12 hour shifts as
slave laborers in factories.
Hundreds died every month as a result of
exhaustion and terrible conditions.
THE FINAL SOLUTION
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Extermination camps were built mostly in Poland
to kill Jews more efficiently
Two of the more famous camps include the
infamous Treblinka and Auschwitz
Auschwitz housed 100,000 people in 300 prison
barracks. It had gas chambers built to kill 2,000
people at a time. Sometimes as many as 12,000
would be killed a day.
1,600,000 people would be killed at Auschwitz
alone
THE FINAL SOLUTION
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Healthy prisoners would be sent to labor campsdisabled people, sick, elderly, mothers and
children were sent straight to the gas chambers
The sights, sounds and the smell of burnt
human flesh from the crematoriums used to
burn dead bodies will forever haunt those that
survived or witnessed the horror
The Impact on Jewish
Society
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In only a few years Jewish culture, which had
existed for over 1,000 years was almost entirely
destroyed by the Nazis in the lands they
conquered. Over 6 Million Jewish people would
die.
There is still great debate on how something so
terrifyingly horrible could have happened-many
point to Germany’s humiliation after World War
I, The Germans peoples fear of the secret
police, Hitler's ability to manipulate information
and a long tradition of anti-Semitism in Europe
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"... in spite of everything, I still believe that
people are really good at heart. I simply can’t
build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of
confusion, misery, and death. I see the world
gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear
the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy
us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and
yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it
will all come right, that this cruelty too will end,
and that peace and tranquillity will return
again." - Anne Frank