Tuesday May 20, 2014
Agenda: Notes on the Holocaust
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtY8ty1pFRQ
• Hitler wanted to create a superior race
of “pure Germans,” called the Aryan
Race
Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mentally and
physically disabled, homosexuals, communists,
Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, political opponents
were all fair game to be discriminated against.
• Anti-Semitism: hostility towards or
discrimination against Jews
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Background of German Jews
.08% of population (525,000)
Most lived in large cities
Most were average, middle-class
Most considered themselves more
German than Jewish
(only 2% of bankers were Jewish!)
Fully integrated into Germany society
Supported WWI and the German
Empire
Hitler and other Germans blamed Jew
for loss of WWI, economic troubles,
etc.
First Solution (1933 – 1938):
Persecution
• Boycott of Jewish
businesses began
in 1933
• Hitler did not
want anyone to
do business
with the Jewish!
SA pickets, wearing boycott signs, block the entrance to
a Jewish-owned shop. The signs read: "Germans, defend
yourselves against the Jewish atrocity propaganda, buy
only at German shops!" and "Germans, defend
yourselves, buy only at German shops!"
• Anti-Jewish Laws
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Fired from public service jobs
Not allowed to attend public schools
Where they could live and travel was limited.
Jews could not attend theatres, visit resorts,
certain districts of German cities were completely
off limits, and could not use public parks or
swimming pools.
– Books written by Jewish authors were banned.
• 1935: Nuremberg Laws passed
– Defined who was a Jew
– Said Jews were not citizens
The fire department only made sure the fire did
not spread to the building next to the
synagogue
View of the interior
of the
Essenweinstrasse
synagogue in
Nuremberg
following its
destruction during
Kristallnacht.
• 1935-1938: Subtle pressure to force
Jews to leave Germany (By late 1930s,
¼ (150,000) of Germany’s Jews had left
their homeland)
• Germans bought up Jewish businesses
for ½ its worth
• Nazis refused to sell Jews real estate or
let Jews stay at hotels
• 1938: persecution becomes more
aggressive
– Jewish property taken
– Forced to take on Israel and Sarah as
middle names
– Forced to wear the yellow star
Second Solution (1939-1941):
Isolation
• Jews relocated to ghettos
– food rations and living conditions
were very poor
– Warsaw, Poland –
largest ghetto
•Many transferred to labor/concentration camps
• Einsatzgruppen: mobile killing squads
used in Poland and Russia
Final Solution (1942):
genocide
• Wannsee Conference January 20, 1942
– Nazi Officials come up with “final
solution” to exterminate all Jews
6 major death camps created: Treblinka, Chelmno,
Sobibor, Maidanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Belzec
Jews from the Lodz ghetto board deportation trains for the
Chelmno death camp
Hundreds of Jews wait to board deportation trains at the railroad station
in Würzburg. Their luggage and bed rolls are piled in the center of the
platform.
“Work makes one free”
• Gas Chambers
– Many victims did not know of their
upcoming death, referred to as
baths/showers
– Carbon monoxide and Zyklon B were used
as poison
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Majdanek:The rear side of a gas chamber. The
furnace to the right was used to create carbon
monoxide for gassing prisoners.
Human remains found in the Dachau
concentration camp crematorium after
liberation. Germany, April 1945.
(Below) After liberation, an Allied
soldier displays a stash of gold
wedding rings taken from victims
at Buchenwald.
(Above) Bales of hair shaven from
women at Auschwitz, used to make
felt-yarn.
• 1944-1945 camps began to be
liberated by Allies
• Video and pictures taken to document
the atrocities
“In Germany, the Nazis came for the
Communists and I didn’t speak up because I
wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the
Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a
Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade
unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I
didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then
they came for me, and by that time there was no
one left to speak for me.”
• ~Martin Niemoller