The Atrocities of WWII: The
Holocaust, Japanese Internment,
& the Atomic Bombs

The Holocaust
• Mass, planned extermination of 11 million people the disabled, homosexuals, Roma,
Communists, union members
• 6 million were Jews
• Driven by Hitler and Nazi’s obsession with creating a racially-superior Third Reich
Auschwitz

Progression of Extermination
• 1933 = Jews banned from government jobs & universities
• 1935 = Nuremberg
Laws removed
German citizenship, forbade marriage with non-Jews, segregated from hospitals, theatres, athletic fields
Auschwitz

• Arson, looting, murders of
Jews across Germany
• 119 synagogues destroyed,
7,500 shops, 35 Jews killed
• 20,000 – 30,000 Jews sent to
Concentration Camps
• Rest forced to wear Yellow
Star of David
• Turning point in world’s awareness of plight of Jews

Jewish Migration?
• By 1939 = 300,000 Jews fled Germany, 200,000 fled Austria
• US did not allow Jewish refugees in
• June 1939 = 900 Jewish refugees arrived on St.
Louis ship in Ft.
Lauderdale, Florida & sent back to Germany
• 700 of the 900 died in concentration camps

Japanese Internment
• Issei: First generation
Japanese Immigrants
(37,000 interned)
• Nisei: U.S.-born
Japanese Americans
(75,000)
• FDR’s Executive Order
9006 = February 1942, all Japanese on West
Coast forcibly removed from homes

Internment Camps

• $2 billion in property & belongings lost
• Supreme Court upheld constitutionality of internment policy,
Korematsu v. US (1942)
• 1982 = US government admitted internment “not based on military necessity”
• 1988 = $20,000 given to
62,000 survivors

The Atomic Bombs
• 1939 = Einstein warned
US about German development of Abomb
• Manhattan Project began in 1941 between only US and Britain
• 2 bombs completed in
Los Alamos, NM
• July 16 1945 =
Alamogordo, NM test bomb exploded

• US threatened to drop bomb if
Japan did not surrender by
August 3, 1945
• August 6, 1945 = Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over
Hiroshima
• August 8, 1945 = Bock’s Car dropped “Hiroshima” over
Nagasaki
• September 6, 1945 = Japan surrendered

• Hiroshima = 60,000 died immediately,
75,000 later from radiation and burns
• Nagasaki = 30,000 died immediately