Extermination camps and genocide, the Holocaust, and
the ‘Final Solution’
Examples of resistance to Nazism in Germany:
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
End of World War II in Europe
Under Adolf Hitler the National Socialist
German Worker’s Party became very powerful
in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Nazis
wanted to get rid of people who they thought
were not as good as they were. They especially
hated Jews and thought they were evil. At the
beginning they made life hard for the Jews in
Germany and all over Europe. Later on, they
decided to kill them. This mass killing was called
the Holocaust.
During world war two, the Nazi policy of
persecution developed into one of genocide.
This is known as the Holocaust. First Jews in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were
rounded up and shot. They were buried in mass
graves. After 1939, the Nazis set up death
camps (or extermination camps), where Jews
were to be systemically killed. The Nazis referred
to this as the ‘Final Solution’. Hitler’s Final Solution
rested on the belief that Aryans were a superior
people and that the strength and purity of this
“master race” must be preserved. To
accomplish this, the Nazis condemned to
slavery and death not only the Jews but other
groups that they viewed as inferior or unworthy
or as “enemies of the state.”
Most of these camps were built in
Poland, which had the largest Jewish
population in Europe. Jewish people from
all over Europe were taken to these
camps in overcrowded cattle trucks. Life
in the camps was a cycle of hunger,
humiliation, and work that almost always
ended in death. The prisoners were
crammed into crude wooden barracks
that held up to a thousand people each.
They shared their crowded quarters, as
well as their meagre meals, with hordes
of rats and fleas. At the camps they were
forced to work and, once they were no
longer able to do so, they were killed. As
deadly as overwork, starvation, beatings,
and bullets were, they did not kill fast
enough to satisfy the Nazis. To mass
slaughter and starvation they would add
a third method of killing – murder by
poison gas. Most were killed by poison
gas. The most well-known camp was
Auschwitz in Poland. It is thought that two
million Jews were killed there.
About six million of the nine million Jews in
Europe died in the Holocaust. Most of them
were from Eastern
European countries. Jewish communities that
had existed for thousands of years were
destroyed.
Jews were not only victims of the Holocaust.
There were at least five million other victims well.
They included
250 000 mentally or physical disabled people,
intellectuals, political opponents, homosexuals,
Jehovah’s witnesses, and 500 000Roma [gypsies]. The Nazi
also carried out terrible medical experiments on about
350 000 people without their consent. One of the bestknown doctors who carried out these experiments was
Doctor Josef Mengele. Millions of Slavic people from
Eastern Europe also died doing slave labour or in the Nazi
death camps
Many Europeans,who were against Hitler’s ideas, tried to
help the Jews. They often hid them, gave them false
documents and helped them escape. A famous book
called “The Diary of Anne Frank” tells the story of a Jewish
girl whose family hid in Amsterdam for two years but were
then caught.
Hitler killed himself shortly before the war was over
because he realized that he had lost the war. When it
ended in 1945, Allied soldiers entered Germany. They
liberated the concentration camps but were shocked
when they saw what had happened there.
Jews who survived the Holocaust had no place to go. They
waited to find a new home. In 1948, the United Nations
decided to give homeless Jews a new place to live. The
state of Israel was founded and hundreds of thousands of
European Jews went there to start a new life.
The Holocaust is one of the most terrible periods of
human history. In many countries, memorials have been
built to remember those who died. Museums in Europe
and America try to show what happened over 60 years
ago and help our generation understand the horrors of
the Second World War.
WHAT CHOICES DID PEOPLE IN NAZI GERMANY HAVE?
➢ Many people blame the cruelty of the Holocaust on Hitler,
the Nazi dictator.
➢ The uncomfortable truth is that it was carried out by
ordinary people.
➢ It is easy for us to judge the German people.
➢ How could they let such terrible things happen? Put yourself
in their shoes......
➢ The Nazi system controlled the thoughts of people from a
young age.
➢ Any art, literature or newspapers that might give a different
perspective were censored.
➢ People who criticised the government were jailed or killed.
How did some people resist the Nazis?
➢ Open resistance was almost impossible, so most people resisted in
ways that would not draw attention to themselves. They hid Jews in
their houses or helped them to escape.
➢ People resisted in private ways by doing things they were not
allowed to for example, they read banned books, or they listened to
BBC.
➢ Political opposition that did exist had to work in secret –
underground movement.
➢ Some people in the church resisted, but others including priests
were anti- Semitic (prejudice against Jews).
➢ Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were leaders of a student
movement – the “White Rose – They were arrested and executed
for their political activities.
You would be resisting Nazi control if you had done the
following:
a) Listen to American Jazz music b) Printed opposition
pamphlets
c) Refused to join the Hitler Youth
d) Wrote anti- Nazi graffiti
e) Privately discussed a different government f) Pushed
for higher wages
g) Helped victims of Nazism emigrate
h) Refused to give the Hitler greeting i) Underachieved
in the workplace
j) Protested at public meetings
k) Refused to attend a Nazi meeting.