Vocabulary:
• Aryan
• Lebensraum (as 1 st
“solution” to the “Jewish problem”
• Genocide
• Auschwitz
• Concentration & Death camps (where were they built & why there)
• Einsatzgruppen
Events:
• Kristallnacht, Nov. 1938
• Targets of the Holocaust
• Final Solution, 1942-45
– Two tactics used to implement
• Types of Resistance
• Four Stages of the
Holocaust
– Identify each stage by time period & major events
• What conditions allowed an event like the
Holocaust to occur
(consider historical stereotypes, political policies & laws, and military situation of the time)

The Holocaust & Nazi Racial
Ideology

• State-sponsored systematic murder of six million Jews, more than two million
Soviets, and 3 million people belonging to other identified groups, including: political prisoners, Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, mentally & physically disabled, Jehovah's
Witnesses, among others.
• Term: “genocide” coined in 1943 to describe the specific targeting of ethnic/racial groups.

• Jews were integrated into
German society
• 0.07% of the population in Germany
• Less integrated in
Eastern Europe
• Anti-Semitism more
“intellectual” in Western
Europe; more violent/aggressive in E.
Europe: Pogroms

• Dictatorship under the Third Reich
• Early Stages of Persecution
• The First Concentration Camps

• World War II
• Murder of the Disabled
• Persecution & Murder of Jews
• Ghettos
• Einsatzgruppen (Mobile Killing Squads)

• Postwar Trials
• Displaced Persons Camps and Emigration
• Pogroms
• Palestine & the British Response
• United Nations, May 18, 1948
• Middle East Turmoil

1. Survival of the race depends on:
• Race purity: there is a hierarchy of races; some are more valuable than others
• Seizure of territory to
“Race Defilement: Women & Girls, the Jews are your ruin!” (1936) expand population

• Jews are a race
• Jews were special enemies of the German people
• Unlike other races, Jews had no living space of their own
• Jews sought to dominate host peoples by destroying the nation-state and establishing
Jewish world domination
• The goals of Jews, by definition, were the genetic bastardization of all peoples and the elimination of all states

• Nazi stereotype depicting
Jews as both money lenders and communists
Throughout history the nations defended themselves against Jewish usury! (1936)
Vote Christian Socialist: German
Christians Save Austria! (1920)

• 1933:
– Hitler appointed Chancellor
– Dachau opens
– April 1, 1933 Boycott
• 1935: Nuremberg Laws
– Took away Jewish citizenship & civil rights; intermarriage prohibited; all Jews forced to wear yellow Star of David for identification
• 1938: Kristallnacht
– Nazi campaign of terror against German Jews; shops & synagogues destroyed; Jews killed & injured; 30,000 Jewish males sent to concentration camps
• 1939: Invasion of Poland (Sept. 1) marks WWII in
Europe
– Only 500,000 Jews in Germany; to have access to European
Jews – Hitler must have a war; seen as an opportunity to progress Nazi racial ideology

• Passengers aboard the
“St. Louis”. These refugees from Nazi
Germany were forced to return to Europe after both Cuba & the United
States denied them entry.
The passengers were sent to France, the
Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain. Early summer, 1939 – by 1940 all those countries except
Britain were under Nazi occupation & many passengers of the St.
Louis died.

• Continuation of identification by racial criteria
• Expulsion to E. Europe
• 1939: 1 st Ghetto established in Poland after invasion
• 1940: Lodz & Warsaw are largest ghettos
– Loss of dignity, dehumanization, loss of privacy, inability to protect family or earn living

Ghettos, or confined areas within a city, are established in occupied eastern Europe (1939). Jews from throughout Europe are forced from their homes and required to live in ghettos.

• In January 1942, 15 top
Nazi officials met to discuss plans for extermination of Europe’s
11 million Jews.
• At that time, 80% of Jews that were to die were still alive; 15 mos. Later they were dead.
• Year of mass deportations from ghettos to camps.

• Nazis systematically round up
Jews throughout Europe and transport them to death camps in Eastern Europe as part of implementation of the “Final
Solution”. Six million are killed.
• The Nazis called this
“resettlement”
• Prior to building of death camps, Nazis used mobile killing squads: Einsatzgruppen
– Between June 1941 – Dec.
1941 they killed 1mn. Jews, but Himmler, head of SS, was concerned about how long it was taking & the toll on the shooters; led to the Death
Camps

• Chelmno opened in Dec. ‘41
• After Wannsee Conference 5 new death camps opened
– Sobibor, March ’42, 250,000
– Belzec, March ’42, 500,000+
– Treblinka, June ’42, 700,000+
– Majdenek, June ’42, 125,000
– Auschwitz, 1942, 1,500,000+

This was the largest camp & was actually 3 camps; 1 st for Polish political prisoners, 2 nd built for Final Solution, 3 rd (BUNA) for slave labor. The only camp that tattooed. Most prisoners survived only a few weeks or maybe months at Auschwitz. Died of gas chambers, dehydration, starvation, labor, disease, medical experiments, and some by suicide. It was the deadliest camp.

Hungarian prisoners arrive at
Auschwitz for selection, May 1944
Prisoners at forced labor at the Siemens factory, Auschwitz 1940 - 44
Hungarian Jews on their way to the gas chambers, May 1944
Bombing Raid on Auschwitz, August 1944

• Allies liberated survivors of camps; approximately 300,000 Jews

• Multitudes interned in
Displaced Persons
Camps in Germany &
Italy to find family members
• Return to home or immigration and resettlement to other countries, especially of those wanting to avoid
Soviet regimes: Israel
(Palestine), the United
States, Canada,
Australia, South America
• Integration into new host countries: struggle & readjustment
An American soldier liberates prisoners at Mauthausen
Children being liberated by Soviet soldiers from Auschwitz, January 1945

• As early as 1943, Allied forces began drafting plans to meet the challenge of liberating, rehabilitating, and repatriating the millions of displaced persons (DPs) who would come under Allied control.
Dining Room at a DP
Camp, Germany 1945
• 6mn. refugees were successfully repatriated; but
1mn. refused to return to their pre-war homes
• By 1948, the majority settled in the new state of Israel and in the U.S. The last DP Camp closed in 1952.
Jewish orphans at a DP
Camp, Germany 1947
British soldiers guard
Jewish refugees on their way to a DP Camp,
Germany 1947

• International Military Tribunals
Witness were held throughout Europe; the most famous were the testifies to being
Nuremberg Trials for Nazi kidnapped by Party Officials judged by each of the 4 Allies Germans from
• The IMT tried 22 "major"
German war criminals on charges of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The
IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds."
Czechoslovakia
Opening statements at the IMT in
Nuremberg,
1945
Nazi Karl
Brandt testifies
Defendant’s Dock

• Armed Resistance:
– Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
– Sobibor & Treblinka Uprisings
– Jews joined resistance fighters in occupied countries
• Acts of Sabotage
– Disrupting war effort in forced labor camps
– Document forgers, food smugglers
– Hiding & escape
• Spiritual resistance
– Attempts to maintain Jewish identity, history, and culture despite attempts of Nazis to eradicate Jewish life from human memory
– Underground schools and libraries
– Documenting the Holocaust
L: Survivors of Treblinka
Uprising. B: Resistance fighters living/hiding in forest