Nazi Ideology and the
Holocaust
Text pages 766-771; 824-829
SSWH18 The student will demonstrate an
understanding of the global political,
economic, and social impact of World War II.
b. Identify Nazi ideology, policies, and
consequences that led to the Holocaust.
Hitler and His Views
• Adolf Hitler was born in Austria on
April 20, 1889
• At the core of Hitler’s ideas was
racism, especially anti-Semitism
• An extreme nationalist who
understood how political parties
could use propaganda & terror
effectively
• Served for four years during WWI in
Germany
• 1919 joined the German Workers
Party
Hitler and His Views Continued…
• By 1921 he had taken control of the party which
had been renamed the National Socialist German
Workers Party or Nazi for short
• Party militia known as SA, Storm Troops, or
Brown shirts
• After an uprising called the Beer Hall Putsch, he
was sentenced to prison
• While in prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf or My
Struggle, an account of his movement and basic
ideas
• Extreme German nationalism, strong antiSemitism and anticommunism are linked together
by a Social Darwinian theory of struggle
Rise of Nazism
• While in prison, Hitler realized the Nazis
would have to gain power through legal
means
• By 1932, Nazi Party had 800,000 members and
was the largest party in the German
Parliament
• Why was the Nazi Party so popular?
– Economic factors- 6 million unemployed in
1932
– Hitler promised to create a new Germany
by appealing to national pride and honor
– People viewed him as their helper, savior,
deliverer
Victory of Nazism
• After 1930, German government ruled by decree
with support of President Hindenburg
• 1933, President Hindenburg made Hitler
chancellor
• March 23, 1933, Enabling Act was passed
allowing the government to ignore the
constitution for four years
• In effect making Hitler a dictator
• When Hindenburg died in 1934, office of the
President was abolished
• Hitler became sole ruler- public officials and
soldiers were required to take a personal oath
of loyalty to Hitler as their Fuhrer or Leader
Timeline for Nazi Extermination Camps
• (Kulmhof) Chelmno
• December 7, 1941
• Gas Vans Killed 320,000
• Auschwitz- Birkenau
• September, 1941
• Zyklon-B Killed 1,200,000
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•
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*Belzek
March 17, 1942
Carbon Monoxide gas
Killed 600,000
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•
•
•
*Sobibor
March, 1942
Carbon Monoxide gas
Killed 250,000
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•
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*Treblinka
July 23, 1942
Carbon Monoxide gas
Killed 700,000
• Majdanek
• October, 1942
• Carbon Monoxide and Zyklon
B gas
• Killed 1,380,000
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•
•
•
Stutthof
June, 1944
Zyklon-B gas
Killed 65,000
The Nazi State, 1933-1939
• Hitler wanted to develop a totalitarian
state
• Larger goal—development of an Aryan
racial state
• Aryan was a state linguists used to
identify people speaking Indo-European
languages
• Nazi’s misused terms and identified the
Aryans with the Ancient Greeks and
Romans and 20th Century Germans and
Scandinavians
• Goal to create a Third Reich, the empire
of Nazi Germany
The New Order in Europe
• In 1942, the Nazi regime stretched across
continental Europe from the English
channel in the west to the outskirts of
Moscow in the east
• Nazi-occupied Europe was largely organized
in two ways:
– Some areas were directly annexed by
Germany and made into German
provinces
– Most was run by German military or
civilian officials with help from local
collaborators
Resettlement in the East
• Nazi administration in the conquered lands to the
east was especially ruthless.
• They were populated, Nazis thought, by racially
inferior Slavic peoples.
• Hitler’s plans for an Aryan racial empire were so
important that he and the Nazis began to put their
racial program into effect soon after the conquest of
Poland.
• Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, was put in
charge of German resettlement plans in the east.
Himmler’s plan was to move the Slavic peoples out
and replace them with Germans.
Resettlement in the East Continued…
• Slavic peoples included Czech, Polish,
Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, and Ukrainian.
• One million Poles were uprooted and
moved to southern Poland.
• By 1942, 2 million ethnic Germans had
been brought in to settle Poland.
• Himmler told a gathering of SS officers
that 30 million Slavs might die in order to
achieve German plans in the east.
Slave Labor in Germany
• In 1942, a special office was set up to
recruit labor for German farms &
industries.
• By 1942, 7 million European workers
were laboring in Germany.
• By summer of 1944, seven million
European workers were forced to
labor for the Nazis in their own
countries.
The Holocaust
• No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terrifying
than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jews.
• Racial struggle was a key element in Hitler’s world of
ideas.
• On one side were the Aryans; on the other were the
Jews, parasites in Hitler’s view, who were trying to
destroy the Aryans.
• Himmler and the SS closely shared Hitler’s racial
ideas.
• The SS was given responsibility for what the Nazi’s
called their Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The
Final Solution was genocide—physical extermination—
of the Jewish people.
• Reinhad Heydrich, head of the SS’s Security Service,
was given the task of administering the Final Solution.
The Holocaust Continued…
• After the defeat of Poland, he ordered forces
to found up all Polish Jews and put them in
ghettos set up in a number of Polish cities.
• Conditions in the ghettos were horrible—
unsanitary housing & minimal amounts of food.
• June 1941, the forces were given the new job of
acting as mobile killing units.
• SS death squads followed the regular army’s
advance in the Soviet Union.
• Their job was to round up Jews, execute them,
and bury them in mass graves.
• The graves were often giant pits dug by the
victims themselves before they were shot.
The Death Camps
• Probably one million Jews were killed by the death
squads
• As appalling as that sounds, it was too slow by Nazi
standards.
• They decided to build death camps to kill the
European Jewish population more efficiently.
• Beginning in 1942, Jews from countries occupied by
German were rounded up, packed like cattle into
freight trains, and shipped to Poland.
• Six extermination centers were built for this
purpose; the largest was Auschwitz.
• About 30% of the arrivals to Auschwitz were sent
to a labor camp, where they were starved or worked
to death.
• The remainder were sent to the gas chambers.
The Death Camps Continued…
• Some inmates were subjected to cruel and painful
“medical” experiments.
• By the spring of 1942, the death camps were in full
operation.
• First priority was given to the elimination of the
ghettos in Poland.
• By the summer of 1942, Jews were being stripped
from France, Belgium, & Holland.
• Even as the Allies were winning the war in 1944, Jews
were being shipped from Greece & Hungary.
• Despite desperate military needs, even late in the war
when Germany faced utter defeat, the Final Solution
had priority in using railroad cars.
The Death Toll
• Germans killed between five and six million Jews, over three
million in death camps.
• Virtually 90% of the Jewish population of Poland, the Baltic
countries, and Germany were killed.
• The Nazi’s were also responsible for the deliberate death by
shooting, starvation, or overwork of at least 9 to 10 million other
people.
• The Nazi’s considered the Roma (gypsies) to be an alien race. They
were rounded up for mass killing. About 40% of Europe’s one
million Romas were killed in the death camps.
• The leading citizens of the Slavic peoples—clergy, intellectuals,
civil leaders, judges, and lawyers were killed.
• Probably an additional 4 million Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians
lost their lives as slave laborers for Nazi Germany.
• Finally, probably at least 3-4 million Soviet POW’s were killed in
captivity.
• This mass slaughter of European civilians is known as
the Holocaust.
• Jews in and out of the camps tried to resist the Nazis.
• Some were aided by friends and soldiers, hidden in
villages or smuggled into safe areas. Foreign diplomats
would issue exit visas in an effort to help.
• The nation of Denmark saved almost its entire Jewish
population.
• Some people did not believe the accounts of the
death camps due to exaggeration as propaganda
during WWI.
• The Allies were aware, but chose to focus on the
ending of the war. Not until after the war did they
learn the full extent of the horror and inhumanity of
the Holocaust.
Children in the War
• Young people of all ages were victims of World War II.
• Jewish women and children were the first to be sent to
the gas chambers because they were unable to work.
• Young Jewish males soon learned to look as adult as
possible in order to survive.
• Altogether, 1.2 million Jewish children died in the
Holocaust.
• Many children were evacuated from cities during the
war to avoid the bombing.
• The Germans created about 9000 camps for children in
the countryside; Japan evacuated 15000 children from
Hiroshima before its destruction.
• The British moved about 6 million children and their
mothers in 1939.
Children of the War…
• Children evacuated to the countryside did
not always see their parents again.
• In 1945, there were perhaps 13 million
orphaned children in Europe.
• All secondary schools in German occupied
Eastern Europe were closed and their
supplies destroyed.
• In the last years of the war, children could
even be found on the war front.
• In the Soviet Union, children as young as 13
or 14 spied on German positions and worked
with the resistance movement.
• Some were even given decorations for killing
the enemy.
• http://shamash.org/holocaust/photos/
• http://www.auschwitz.dk/index.htm
• http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holoca
mp.html
• http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/
• http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resourc
e/gallery/L1945B.htm
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IN FALL 2008
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