Lesson Seven -
The Holocaust
Outcomes
 Students will identify details of the Holocaust, including Hitler’s “Jewish
Question/Problem”, his “Final Solution”, the Ghettos and other relevant
information
 Students will identify the major wartime conferences held during and after
WWII and important decisions made during those meetings

Activities
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4.
WWII Quiz #2
Power Point - The Holocaust. These are just visuals. Use the lecture
notes so students can just listen and look at visual images of the
Holocaust. Use attached lecture notes.
Movie clip – “Schindler’s List”. Class discussion of the ethics of
participation in this genocide. Student hand out - Hitler’s Jewish
Soldier. Read and discuss.
Hand-out – Major Conferences of WWII. Go over these 3 meetings
and the decisions that were made
Materials
1.
2.
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5.
Power Point – The Holocaust
Lecture Notes on Holocaust
Schindler’s List movie clip
Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers handout
Major Conferences of WWII.
Lecture Notes on the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism dates back to the days of Christ…
 Jesus was a Jew, but eventually his followers saw him as the Messiah, a
very different outlook and belief than Jews had
 Many Christians blamed the Jews, claiming they had given Jesus up to the
Romans for crucifixion
 Christians, throughout the 2 centuries that followed Christ’s death, would
persecute Jews… killing them in the Crusades, expelling them from their
countries (England, Spain) and forcing them to live in ghettos
 Jews were money-lenders, which was illegal for Christians, and the
interest (usury) they charged made them unpopular
 Martin Luther advised Christians to set synagogues on fire when he found
that Jews wouldn’t convert to Protestantism
 Russian newspaper publishes “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – totally
made up plans of a worldwide Jewish take-over (1903)
Slide 2
Anti-Semitism in Germany
Slide 3
 Hitler from the time he was quite young, blamed Jews for the downfall of
Germany during and after WWI
 Non-Jewish Germans were quick to point out that Karl Marx (father of
communism) was a Jew
 Alfred Rosenberg re-writes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion AND aids
Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch
 Hugo Bettauer, an Austrian Jew, wrote “City Without Jews” which
narrated the events of a city’s collapse after all the Jews are forced out.
He is murdered in his office by a Nazi (Otto Rothstock) who when put on
trial, was acquitted and became a national hero
 Albert Einstein, a German Jew, decides to leave Germany after Hitler
becomes Chancellor
 March 22, 1933  first concentration camp is opened at Dachau
 November 9th, 1938 – “Krystallnacht”
Slides 4 - 12
 By 1939, six large concentration camps existed in Poland (Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Lublin and Chelmno). By 1941, they started
operating as “death camps”
Slides 1315
 Jews were forced from their homes, their possessions taken from them,
and forced to live in walled in ghettos. The Warsaw ghetto was opened in
1940, with approximately 380 000 people crammed into this filthy living
area
 Jews in the ghetto died from various diseases and starvation (they were
allocated under 300 calories of food each day)
Slide 16
 NAZIS forced Jews to form a Judenrat or Jewish Council whose job it
was to provide Jews for slave labour or deport them to extermination
camps. Those who refused were shot.
 1942 – Wannsee Conference – NAZIS start the “Final Solution” which
includes the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto
Slides 1719
Slides 2021
Slide 22
 In the next 52 days, about 300 000 Jews were deported to Treblinka for
extermination
 1943 – Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. What remained of the Jews (50 000)
organized an uprising. They had smuggled in grenades and guns and
attacked German patrols. NAZIS responded by shelling houses and
rounding up and shooting Jews. During this uprising, 7 000 were shot, 6
000 were burnt alive and the rest were deported to Treblinka
 The NAZIS had established the T-4 euthanasia program, using mobile gas
vans to put to death people with supposedly incurable medical conditions
and mental illnesses
 The gas vans used carbon monoxide to poison their victims.
Slide 23
 Eventually stationary gas chambers were constructed close to railway lines
so that diesel engine could pump CO gas into them, then the victims were
buried in mass graves or burned in open pits (Named the Reinhard Camps
after SS leader Reinhard Heydrich). Approximately 1.5 million Polish Jews
died this way.
 In Auschwitz, the NAZIS experimented with Zyklon-B in the gas chambers.
To dispose of the bodies easily, the gas chamber was built beneath a
Slides 24 -25
crematorium. An estimated 1 million Jews died at Auschwitz.
Slides 26-27
 Trains transported Jews to the camps. There were no toilets, and often
not even buckets. Cars were so crowded people couldn’t lie down, often
couldn’t breathe. Many died (mercifully?) on the way.
Slides 28-30
 Some Jews had the job of digging the graves that gassed bodies would be
buried (before cremation started). They would often be shot at the end of
the day, replaced by workers from the next trainload
 At death camps, men and women were separated, forced to undress and
then walked down the Himmelfahrtstrasse (“Street to Heaven”) into
the gas chamber.
 Zyklon B poured into the room, killing the victims quickly. They were then
hosed down, removed by other Jewish prisoners, gold teeth extracted and
dropped in buckets of acid to remove flesh and bone, then either buried in
mass graves (later these were exhumed and burned), burned in open pits,
or in crematoriums
Slide 31
 The victims’ possessions were sorted and usually sent to Germans. Gold
teeth were melted down into gold bars. Hair of women and girls was
used to insulate submarine hulls and make socks for submarine crews
Slide 32
 Those who didn’t die immediately were put to work. They would have
their hair cut off and shower (to remove “lice), and the process was as
humiliating as possible
Slide 33
 A coloured triangle was sewn onto the prisoners’ uniforms (red = political
prisoner or priest, green = professional criminal, pink = homosexual,
brown for gypsies, violet for Jehovah’s Witnesses, black for “a-socials”
which were alcoholics or prostitutes. Jews were given a black and yellow
triangle that together formed the 6-pointed Star of David)
Slide 35-40
 KEY NAZIS IN THE HOLOCAUST
-Hitler apparently never set foot near a death camp, but it was his “Final
Solution”
-Joseph Goebbels – Propaganda Minister
-Hermann Goring – commander of the Luftwaffe
-Heinrich Himmler – leader of the SS and responsible for operation of the
death camps
-Rudolf Hoss – SS leader who experimented with Zyklon B
-Josef Mengele - also known as the Angel of Death, known for performing
grisly human experiments
Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity,
using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in
identical twins; they would be selected and placed in special barracks. He also
recruited Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician. As a doctor, Epstein proposed
to Mengele a study into treatments of the disease called Noma that was noted
for particularly affecting children from the camp.
While the exact cause of Noma remains uncertain, it is now known that it has a
higher occurrence in children suffering from malnutrition and a lower immune
system response. Many develop the disease shortly after contracting another
illness such as measles or tuberculosis.
Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among the arrivals
at the concentration camp. These included dwarfs, notably the Ovitz family - the
children of a Romanian artist, of whom seven of the ten members were dwarfs.
Prior to their deportation, they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe.
Mengele often called them "my dwarf family"; to him they seemed to be the
perfect expression of "the abnorm"
Mengele's experiments also included attempts to take one twin's eyeballs and
attach them to the back of the other twin's head, changing eye colour by
injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other
brutal surgeries. Rena Gelissen's account of her time in Auschwitz details certain
experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. Mengele
would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock
treatments. Most of the victims died, because of either the experiments or later
infections.
"Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Roma twins during the night.
Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to
sleep. He then injected chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly.
Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each piece of the twins'
bodies."
At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of twin studies. After the experiment was
over, these twins were usually killed and their bodies dissected. He supervised an
operation by which two Romani children were sewn together to create conjoined
twins; the hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had
been resected, this also caused gangrene.
The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary
prisoners and were, for the time being, safe from the gas chambers.[14] When
visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered
them sweets. Some survivors remember that despite his grim acts, he was also
called "Mengele the protector".
The book Children of the Flames, by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Shiela Cohn
Dekel, chronicles Mengele's medical experimental activities on approximately
3,000 twins who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during World War II
until its liberation at the end of the war. Only 100 pairs of twins survived; 60
years later, they came forward about the special privileges they were given in
Auschwitz owing to Mengele's interest in twins, and how as a result they have
suffered, as the children who survived his medical experiments and injections.
Auschwitz prisoner Alex Dekel has said: "I have never accepted the fact that
Mengele himself believed he was doing serious work — not from the slipshod
way he went about it. He was only exercising his power. Mengele ran a butcher
shop — major surgeries were performed without anaesthesia. Once, I witnessed
a stomach operation — Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but
without any anaesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again
without anaesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad
because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him — why did this
one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to
do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part."
Slides 41-42
 1945 – Allied troops liberate the remaining prisoners in the death camps,
including Bergen Belsen – liberated by British and Canadian troops on
April 15th . It was too late for many, including Ann Frank, who died there
with her sister Margot that year in March. Even after the liberation,
another 50 000 died at this camp as they were so weak.
Slide 43
 Nuremburg Trials – a series of trials from 1945-49, involving NAZI
conspirators of the Holocaust. 23 defendants – 11 sentenced to death, 4
sentences of 10-20 years, 3 life sentences, 3 acquitted, 1 suicide, 1
medically unfit for trial
Numbers of Refugees That Canada (Didn't) Accept
"During the twelve years of Nazi terror, from 1933 to 1945, while the United States
accepted more than 200,000 Jewish refuges; Palestine, 125,000; embattled Britain,
70,000; Argentina, 50,000; penurious Brazil, 27,000; distant China, 25,000; tiny Bolivia
and Chile, 14,000 each, Canada found room for fewer than 5,000."
Excerpted fromNONE IS TOO MANY, Irving Abella and Harold Troper, Toronto,
1982ISBD 0-919630-31-6. (Canada & The Jews of Europe, 1933-1948)
PM CHART
POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, SOCIAL EFFECTS OF WWII
Political
Economic
Social
+
-
-gained an international
reputation and became a
“middle power”
-we would play an important
role in the creation of the UN
-troops were recognized for
the wartime contributions at
Dieppe, etc)
-PM averted a conscription
crisis
-Gov’t social safety net was
further strengthened
-achievements of minorities
advanced the cause of civil
rights
-Canada’s economy grew due
to all its contributions to the
war effort
-industrial and manufacturing
production grew to overtake
agriculture as the most
important sector in Canada
-virtually every sector of our
economy boomed
-wave of exploration led to the
discovery of oil fields in AB
-our GDP more than doubled
-we became a modern
industrial nation
-many new jobs created
-women achieved greater
recognition for their wartime
contributions in factories, etc
-we became a more tolerant
nation, as we eventually
agreed to take in displaced
person and refugees
-“baby boom” was
experienced
-immigration increased our
population as Pier 21 in
Halifax officially reopened (48
000 war brides and 21 000
children arrived, along with
500 000 immigrants/refugees)
-French/English relations were
once again strained, BUT not
broken!
- debt due to the war was
over $10 billion
-income tax is here to stay!
-inflation rises
-many Canadians were killed,
wounded or captured in the
war
(lost over 42 000)
Socials 11
Name ___________________________
Block _____
MAJOR WWII WARTIME CONFERENCES
Tehran – 1943
-Held in Iran
-first time the “Big 3” would meet. (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin)
-didn’t accomplish a lot, but established friendly relations between
the 2 democratic leaders and Stalin
Yalta – Feb, 1945
-held in the south of the Soviet Union
-decisions made:
1. Germany was to be divided into zones of occupation
2. a war crimes court was to be held at Nuremburg
3. Stalin promises to hold free elections in the countries he was
liberating from the NAZIS ( he did not keep his promise )
Potsdam – July 1945
-held near Berlin
-former war allies met to decide the future of Germany & Europe
-was supposed to be a planning session for a peace conference
-however, democratic and communist leaders no longer trusted
each other, it became more like setting the stage for the next war
THE COLD WAR!