Download The Jewish Holocaust

The Jewish Holocaust
The Shoah
History 12
Ms Leslie
Definition
 destruction or slaughter on a mass
scale
 Destruction by fire
 "Where they burn books, so too will they in the
end burn human beings." ~ Heine
 One century later, Heine's books were among the thousands
of volumes that were torched by the Nazis in Berlin's
Opernplatz.
 Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it.
~ Santayana
Background to anti-Semitism:
1. It’s been around since before Christianity
2. Judaism rejects the worshiping of idols which alienated
other cultures.
3. Angered the Romans be refusing to worship the emperor
4. Christians persecute the Jews for being the Killers of
Christ
5. 12th Century were blamed for the murder of Christian
Children during Jewish Passover
6. Jews were denied rights accorded of their Christian
neighbours and had to wear identifying badges
7. Some Jews were forced into ghettos or denied the right to
own land
8. Often Jews were forced from one place to find homes
elsewhere.
 Circa 1900 in Germany, petition gets
over 225,000 signatures take away the
Jews’ right to vote
 Czarist Russia = pogroms
 Bolsheviks accused of being Jews
 Large Anti-Semitic movement in
France in the early 20th century
Germany 1933-39
 Nuremberg Laws
1935
 First concentration
camp = Dachau in
1933
 May 10, 1933 20,000 books
burned
 Kristallnacht
Jewish Ghettos 1939-41
 a part of a city, esp. a slum area,
occupied by a minority group or
groups.
 Has been happening for centuries
 Difference = Nazi ghettos are
preparation for extermination
First steps
 After Invasion of Poland - 3.5 million
Jews at mercy of the Einsatzgruppen
Special SS division for getting rid of
‘undesirables’
 Started rounding up ‘undersirables’ Final Solution does not start until 1942
Polish Ghettos
 Poles told that Jews were natural carriers of all
types of diseases, especially typhus, and that it
was necessary to isolate Jews.
 The five major ghettos were located in Warsaw,
Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, and Lvov.
 the Nazis established 356 ghettos in Poland, the
Soviet Union, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia,
Romania, and Hungary between 1939 and 1945
 Larger cities = walled in ghettos
 Jews were not allowed to leave under
penalty of death
 Smallest = 3,000
 Largest (Warsaw) = 400,000
Ghetto Life
 Filthy, poor sanitation
 Over crowding - many families in one
room
 Rampant disease
 No fuel = Cold winters
 Starvation
 Evacuation of ghettos in 1942, empty
by 1944
Children smuggling despite
death penalty
Building of the wall
Warsaw = 37% of pop. In
4.6% of area
Inspecting the wall
Homeless Children
Forced labour - Metal shop
Forced labour - sewing
Hungry children - only 300
calories a day.
The Camps 1941-42
 concentration camps, forced labor camps,
extermination or death camps, transit
camps, and prisoner-of-war camps
 Dachau - the first - for political opponents.
 Gradually started imprisoning Jews,
Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, dissenting
clergy, homosexuals
Death Camps
 Auschwitz-Birkenau Treblinka, Belzec,
Sobibor, Lublin (also called Majdanek),
and Chelmno
 Chelmno started in 1941, the rest in 1942.
The Final Solution
 As we walked down the main roadway of the camp,
we were cheered by the internees, and for the first
time we saw their condition. A great number were
little more than living skeletons. There were men and
women lying in heaps on both sides of the track.
Others were walking slowly and aimlessly about,
vacant expressions on their starved faces.
~ Coloner Tayler - liberator of Bergen Belsen
 The outside world reacted with horror
and indignation
 This wasn’t even an extermination
camp, it was a sick camp.
The beginning
 January 30, 1939, Hitler announced in
a new Europe the Jews would be
destroyed - did not elaborate
 Talked about moving the all to
Madagascar
 Solidified plans with Himmler and
Heydrich after the invasion of Russia
 No written order exists - Hitler rarely
made written orders for things of
importance.
 Final solution included all Jews of
Europe and the UK.
Einsatzgruppen
 Created May 1941 to exterminate the
Jews.
 German troops, auxiliary police,
Ukrainian and Baltic volunteers.
 No shortage of willing volunteers. massive increase in pay, special leave
and share in the loot.
 In 4 months 600,000 Jews are killed
 Started with shootings
 Made Jews did their own graves.
 Babi Yar - Sept 29-30, 33,000 Jews
killed in a single night outside of Kiev.
Largest single massacre of the
holocaust
[O]ne after the other, they had to remove their
luggage, then their coats, shoes, and over garments
and also underwear … Once undressed, they were
led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long
and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep …
When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were
seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to
lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot …
The corpses were literally in layers. A police
marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck
with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen
stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the
other … The marksman would walk across the bodies
of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had
meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.
Wansee Conference
 Jan 20, 1942
 When the Final Solution (Endlosung)
was determined
 Tallied up 11,000,000 Jews in Europe
 Planned slave labour and
extermination
 "Europe would be combed of Jews from
east to west," Heydrich stated.
 Minutes kept with code words
 "...eliminated by natural causes," = death
by hard labor and starvation.
 "...treated accordingly," "special treatment"
and "special actions" = SS firing squads or
death by gassing
Methods of death
 Chelmno = Carbon monoxide vans
 Einstazgruppen = bullets
 These methods deems too slow
 News camps Belzec, Sobibor and
Treblinka use poison gass
 Treblinka = gas 200 at a time
 Largest camp = Auschwitz.
 Can take 2,000 victims at a time
 Death in only 20 mins
Zyklon B
 Pesticide in pellet form
 dumped into the chambers via openings in the
ceiling.
 The pellets would then vaporize, giving off a
noticeable bitter almond odor.
 Upon being breathed in, the vapors combined
with red blood cells, depriving the human body of
vital oxygen, causing unconsciousness, and then
death through oxygen starvation.
 Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw
the gassings, testified that: "Shouting and
screaming of the victims could be heard
through the opening and it was clear that
they fought for their lives." When they
were removed, if the chamber had been
very congested, as they often were, the
victims were found half-squatting, their
skin colored pink with red and green spots,
some foaming at the mouth or bleeding
from the ears.
 Rudolf Hoess, at his war-crimes tribunal said:
 It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in
the chambers, according to climatic conditions.
We knew the people were dead because their
screaming stopped…After the bodies were
removed out special commandos took off the
rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the
corpses.
Empty zyklon b cans
 Mass transports to Auschwitz began
March 1942
 2 million murdered there
 Medical experiments
Getting rid of the evidence
 Cremation
 Ashes
scattered in
country
side/rivers
 Clothing/gold
recycled for
war machine
 The importance of the operation to Hitler
and the Nazi leadership is evident when
one considered that the transportation of
Jews to the death camps was given higher
priority that the transportation of war
materials.
With defeat….
 Germans start to shut down death
camps in 1943. Still have impressive
extermination figures
 Treblinka, (750,000 Jews); Belzec,
(550,000 Jews); Sobibor (200,000 Jews);
Chelmno, (150,000 Jews) and Lublin (also
called Majdanek, 50,000 Jews).
 Auschwitz stays open until summer of
1944.
 Prisoners force to walk into central
Germany.
 These ‘death marches’ kills thousands.
Resistance 1942-44
 Partisans - hid in the Russian forests
 Acts of sabotage
 Warsaw uprising - after 400,000 Jews
deported, 60,000 rebelled.
 The revolt lasted 1 month and
thousands more killed as a result.
 Stalin called for an underground
movement to fight the enemy
 Russia home to partisan headquarters
 Cut telephone wires, blew up bridges,
roads and railways.
 Summer 1943 - prisoners at Treblinka
set fire to most of it. Only 15-20
escape.
 October 7 - sonderkommandos blow up
a crematoria at Auschwitz.
Hiding
 In many cities non-Jews hid their
Jewish neighbours.
 At risk of death
 Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat
led the effort that saved 100,000 Hungarian
Jews in 1944.
 Another rescuer, Oscar Schindler, saved
over 1,000 Polish Jews from their deaths.
Liberation starts
 First camp liberated was Majdanek by
the Soviets, July 25, 1944
 Auschwitz Liberated Jan 27, 1945
Liberation
 Allied troops shocked at what they
found
 Rooms of baby shoes and hair
 Gas chambers with fingernail marks on
the walls
 Eisenhower forced the local Germans
to walk threw the camps to witness
what they allowed.
 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3j9e
6_liberation-of-dachau-in-color_people
German civilians forced to see
Issue of guilt
 Blame individuals or everyone?
 Blame those issuing the orders? Or the
solders carrying them out?
How could they not know?
 Slave labour was in major German
cities
 Returning solders told stories of
einsatzgruppen
 Smell of cremation
 Campson major railways lines
 People knew - When Finland found out
they halted the transportation of their
Jews.
 The New York Times reported in May
1942 that 100,000 Jews had been
machine gunned down in the Baltic
States
Allies to blame?
 Churchill and Stalin knew, yet did not
publicize it
 Could have bombed the rail ways
 Could have bombed the camps
 They just felt helpless - what could you
do?
Nuremberg Trials
 War crimes trials after the war
 USA, UK, France, USSR
 Each supplied 2 judges
 Started in 1946 with 177 people
charged - only 3 aquitted
The crimes:
 Count 1 - CONSPIRACY to commit crimes alleged
in the next three counts.
 Count 2 - CRIMES AGAINST PEACE including
planning, preparing, starting, or waging aggressive
war.
 Count 3 - WAR CRIMES including violations of laws
or customs of war.
 Count 4 - CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
including murder, extermination, enslavement,
persecution on political or racial grounds, involuntary
deportment, and inhumane acts against civilian
populations.
Their defense
 Just following orders
 A lot of evidence against them
Some of the people tried
 Hermann Goring
 Rudolf Hess
 Von Ribbentrop
 Von Papen
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
 By the United Nations General
Assembly Dec 10, 1948.
 Because of what was seen in WWII
 30 articles of all humans world wide
Some of the rights
 Everyone’s equal
 Everyone’s free
 Right to life
 No slavery
 No torture
 Right to a legal defense
 Freedom of movement
Establishment of Israel
 Creating a Jewish home in Palestine
 Nov 1947 - partition Palestine in to a
Jewish state and an Arab state
 Israel declares independence on May
14, 1948
 Neighbouring Arab sates attack the
next day