The Holocaust

Key Words

-Anti-Semitism -Concentration Camp -Death Camp -Genocide -Holocaust

Objectives

-Trace the roots and progress of Hitler's campaign against the Jews -Explore the goals of Hitler's "final solution" and the nature of the Nazi death camps -Examine how the United States responded to the Holocaust

Violence Erupts on Kristallnacht

Acts of violence against Jews were common. The most serious attack occured on November 9, 1938, and is known as Kristallnacht, or the "Night of the Broken Glass." After a Jewish refugee killed a German diplomat in Paris, Nazi officials ordered attacks on Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Secret police and military units destroyed more than 1,500 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, killed more than 200 Jews, and injured more than 600 others. The Nazis arrested thousands of Jews.

Early Response Was Weak

Before the war, the United States could have done more if it had relaxed its immigration policy. It could have accepted more Jewish refugees and saved the lives of many German and Austrian Jews. However, the State Department at first made a conscious effort to block Jewish immigration. Later commentators have blamed this failure to help European Jews on a variety of actors: anti-Semitism, apathy, preoccupation with the problems of the Great Depression, and a tendency to underestimate Hitler's genocidal plans.

Jewish Refugees Face Obstacles

Between 1933 and 1937, about 129,000 Jews fled Germany and Nazi-controlled Austria. They included some of the most notable figures in the scientific and artistic world, including Albert Einstein. More Jews would have left, but they were not generally welcomed into other countries. During the Great Depression, with jobs scarce, the United States and other countries barred their doors to many Jews. In 1939, the ocean liner St. Louis departed Germany for Cuba with more than 900 Jewish refugees on board. Only 22 of the passengers received permission to stay in Cuba. U.S. officials refused to accept any of the refugees. The ship returned to Germany. Almost 600 of the Jews abroad the St. Louis later died in Nazi concentration camps.

What can you infer about the Nazis' opinions of Jews from the Nazi use of boxcars to transport Jews to camps?

Boxcars are used to transport animals. One can infer that the Germans thought that the Jews were no better than animals.

War Refugee Board

By early 1944, however, FDR began to respond to the reports. He established the War Refugee Board, which worked with the Red Cross to save thousands of Eastern European Jews, especially in Romania and Hungary. Tragically, too few were saved. Of the Allies, the Soviet Union was closest to the death camps, but Stalin showed no concern. Britain and the United States expressed sympathy, but their resources and strategy were focused on defeating Hitler not on stopping his genocidal campaign. They might have bombed railway lines to the death camps, but the camps were not military targets. The Allies also refused to pressure countries within the Nazi sphere of influence to stop the transportation of Jews to Germany.

How do you think Hitler benefited from targeting these groups?

By making the German people fear and despise non-Germans, Germans were more likely to accept Hitler's rule. Putting down other people may have made Hitler and others feel strong and superior.

Nazis Build Concentration Camps Part 2

Camp administrators tattooed numbers on the arms of prisoners and dressed them in vertically striped uniforms with traingular insignias. For example, political prisoners wore red insignias, homosexuals pink, Jews yellow, and Jehovah's Witnesses purple. Inside the walls of the concentration camps, there were no real restraints on sadistic guards. They tortured and even killed prisoners with no fear of reprisals from their superiors. Death by starvation and disease was an everyday occurrence. In addition, doctors at camps such as Dachau conducted horrible medical experiments that either killed inmates or left them deformed. Prisoners were made subjects of bogus experiments on oxygen deprivation, hypothermia, and the effects of altitude. Bodies were mutilated without anesthesia. Thousands of prisoners died in agonizing pain, including some 5,000 mentally or physically diabled children.

Allied Soldiers Liberate the Camps

For most Americans, the enormity of the Nazi crime became real only when soldiers began to liberate the concentratoin camps that dotted the map of Germany. When they saw it all--the piles of dead bodies, the warehouses full of human hair and jewelry, the ashes in crematoriums, the half-dead emaciated survivors--they realized as never before that evil was more than an abstraction. Hardened by war, accustomed to the sight and smell of death, the soldiers who liberated the camps were nevertheless unprepared for what they saw. Major Richard Winters--who had parachuted behind enemy lines on D-Day, defended Bastogne at the Battle of the Bulge, and risked his life in a number of other engagements--was stunned almost beyond belief.

Hitler Preaches Hate/Anti-Semitism

From the start, the Nazi movement trafficked in hatred and anti-Semitism. Hitler blamed Jews for all the ills of Germany, from communism to inflation to abstrct painting--and, especially, for the defeat of Germany in World War I. Other extremists influenced Hitler's ideas and shared his prejudices. In the 1920s, his was just another angry voice in the Weimar Republic, advancing simplistic answers for the nation's grave economic, political, and social troubles. In 1933, however, Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

Who did Hitler target as non-desirables?

Gypsies, Slavs, the mentally ill, Jews, and others who were not Germans.

Nazis Begin the Persecution/Nuremberg Laws

Hitler's persecution of the Jews began as soon as he came into power. At first, his focus was economic. He urged Germans to boycott Jewish-owned businesses, and he barred Jews from jobs in civil service, banking, the stock exchange, law, journalism, and medicine. In 1935, Hitler moved to a broader legal persecution. The Nuremberg Laws, named for the city that served as the spritual center of Nazism, denied German citizenship to Jews, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and segregated Jews at every level of society. Yet even these measures were not enough for Hitler. He hinted that, in the future, there might be what he called the "Final Solution to the Jewish question." Hitler employed the full power of the state in his anti-Semitic campaigns. Newspapers printed scandalous attacks against Jews. Children in schools and the Hitler Youth movement were taught that Jews were "polluting" German society and culture. Comic books contained vile caricatures of Jews.

Nazis Build Concentration Camps

In 1933, the year he became chancellor, Hitler opened the first Nazi concentration camps, where members of specially designated groups were confined. The earliest camps included Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. Later, Ravensbruck, not far from Berlin, was opened for female prisoners. In theory, the camps were designed not to kill prisoners, but to turn them into "useful members" of the Third Reich. The Nazis imprisoned political opponents such as labor leaders, socialists, and communists, as well as anyone--journalists or novelists, ministers or priests--who spoke out against Hitler. Many Jews as well as Aryans who had intimate relations with Jews were sent to camps. Other groups targeted as "undesirable" included Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, beggars, drunkards, conscientious objectors, the physically disabled, and people with mental illness.

Roots of the Holocaust

In 1945, there was no word for it. Today, it is called the Holocaust, the Nazi attempt to kill all Jews under their countrol. The mass murders of Jews, as well as other "undesirables," were a direct result of a racist Nazi ideology that considered Aryans (white gentiles, especially those of Germanic, Nordic, and Anglo-Saxon blood) superior to other people.

Death Camps Part 2

In fully functioning death camps, the bodies of murdered prisoners were further desecrated. Human fat was turned into soap, human hair was women into wigs, slippers and mattresses: cash, gold fillings, wedding rings, and other valuables were stripped off the victims. After the Nazis had taken what they wanted, they burned the bodies in crematoriums. By 1945, about 6 million European Jews had been murdered. But Jews were not the only victims. As many as 5 million others lay dead, including nearly 2 million non-Jewish Poles. While many survivors lived with constant nightmares of the experience, or with the sorrow and guilt of being the last members of their families, many others determined the rebuild their lives and families in the United States, Israel, or elsewhere and continue to be productive citizens.

According to Nesse, what was a typical day like in the camps?

It started with roll call, then a little food, and then manual labor.

Death Camps

Many concentration camps, especially in Poland, were designated as death camps, where prisoners were systematically exterminated. The largest death camp was Auschwitz in southern Poland. Others included Treblinka, Maidenek, Sobibor, Belsac, and Chelmno. Prisoners from various parts of the Reich were transported by trains to the death camps and murdered. Nazis forced prisoners into death chambers and pumped in carbon monoxide or crammed the prisoners into showerlike facilities and released the insecticide Zyklon B. Some concentration camps that the Nazis converted into death camps did not have gassing equipment. In these camps, Nazi guards shot hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Nazi "Action Groups" that followed the army into Eastern Europe also shot several million Jews and buried them in ditches.

American Government Takes Action

Once the war started, news of the mass killings had filtered to the West. By the end of 1942, the allies issued a statement acknowledging that Jews were being taken to Poland and killed there. In April 1943, British and American officials hosted the Bermuda Conference to discuss the possibility of rescuing the surviving Jewish refugees from Europe. However, no concrete action was taken.

Nazis Adopt the "Final Solution"/Genocide

Since 1933, the Nazis had denied Jews the rights of citizenship and committed acts of brutality against them. These acts of persecution were steps toward Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish question": nothing short of the systematic extermination of all Jews living in the regions controlled by the Third Reich. Today, we call such willful annihilation of a racial, political, or cultural group genocide.

What happened to Jews sent to the camps?

Some were sent to die. Others were forced to do slave labor.

The Allies and the Holocaust

The inevitable question about the Holocaust is: Could it have been prevented? Could the nations in the democratic West--especially Britin, France, and the United States--have intervened at some point and stopped the slaughter of millions of innocent people? There are no simple answers to these questions. However, many people today that the West could have done more than it did.

Allied Soldiers Liberate the Camps Part 2

The liberation of the camps led to an outpouring of American sympathy and sincere longing to aid the victims. Many survivors found temporary or permanent homes in the United States. The revelation of the Holocaust also increased demand and support for an independent Jewish homeland. In 1948, when the Jewish community in Palestine proclaimed the State of Israel, President Truman immediately recognized the new nation. The United States became perhaps the staunchest ally of the new Jewish State.

What did the Nazis do when the Allies invaded Germany?

They began to hide evidence of the death camps and marched the prisoners away from the front.

Millions Are Murdered in Death Camps

When Germany invaded Poland and the Soviet Union, the Nazis gained control of large territories that were home to millions of Jews. Under Nazi rule, Jews in Warsaw, Lodz, and other Polish cities were forced to live in crowded, walled ghettos. Nazis also constructed additional concentration camps in Poland and Eastern Europe. At first, the murder of Jews and other prisoners tendedot be more arbitrary than systematic. But at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Nazi leaders made the decision to move toward Hitler's "Final Solution." Reinhard Heydrich, an SS leader known as "the man with an iron heart," outlined a plan to exterminate about 11,000,000 Jews. Although the minutes of the meeting do not use the word "kill," everyone there understood that killing was their goal.