The Holocaust
Background Notes
The Holocaust

The word “Holocaust” comes from the
Greek words “holos” meaning _whole
and “kaustos” meaning burned .

The Holocaust was the mass murder of
approximately six million European Jews
by the German Nazi regime during World
War II.
World War II

World War II lasted from 1939 - 1945.

Rising to power in an economically and
politically unstable Germany, Adolf Hitler
and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party
rearmed the nation and signed strategic
treaties with Italy and Japan to further his
ambitions of world domination.
World War II

Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939
drove Great Britain and France to declare war
on Germany, and World War II had begun.

Among the estimated 45-60 million people
killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi
concentration camps as part of Hitler's
diabolical "Final Solution" now known as the
Holocaust.
World War II

World War II was fought between two groups of
countries: the Allied Powers and the Axis Powers.

The Allies primarily consisted of Great Britain, the
Soviet Union, and the United States.

The Axis Powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The United States was not officially involved in the
war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in
December, 1941.
Pearl Harbor
World War II
Allied Powers


Axis Powers

Germany
Italy
Japan

Others Included
1939—

◦ United Kingdom (British
Empire)
◦ France (invaded by Germany)
◦ Poland (invaded by Germany)

Later in the War
◦
◦
◦
◦
◦
◦
Soviet Union (Russia)
United States
Canada
Belgium
Norway
Many others
◦ Yugoslavia
◦ Bulgaria
◦ Hungary
◦ Romania
◦ Slovakia
World War II
Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an
Austrian-born German
politician and the leader
of the Nazi Party.

He was Chancellor of
Germany from 19331945 and Dictator of
Nazi Germany from
1934-1945.
Adolf Hitler

Hitler was an anti-Semite. AntiSemitism is a prejudice or hatred of, or
discrimination against Jews for reasons
connected to their Jewish heritage.

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the
superiority of the "pure" German race,
which he called Aryan.
The Nazi Party

The Nazi Party grew in popularity in Germany from
1933-1939, and the party adopted Hitler’s two main
goals: racial purity and spatial expansion.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000,
or only one percent of the total German population.

During the next six years, Nazis undertook an
Aryanization of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans
from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned
businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors
of their clients.
The Nazi Party


Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became
routine targets for stigmatization and
persecution. German synagogues were
burned and windows in Jewish shops were
smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and
thousands more arrested.
From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands
of Jews who were able to leave Germany did,
while those who remained lived in a
constant state of uncertainty and fear.
The Nazi Party

The Swastika became
a symbol for the
Aryan race.

The symbol was used
to represent the
German Nazi party
during the 1930s and
1940s.
Ghettoes and Concentration Camps

In September 1939, the German army occupied
the western half of Poland.

German police soon forced tens of thousands of
Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes,
giving their confiscated properties to ethnic
Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who
identified as German).
Ghettoes and Concentration
Camps

Surrounded by high walls
and barbed wire, the
Jewish ghettoes in Poland
functioned like captive
city-states, governed by
Jewish Councils.

In addition to widespread
unemployment, poverty
and hunger,
overpopulation made the
ghettoes breeding
grounds for disease such
as typhus.
Ghettoes and Concentration Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass
transports from the ghettoes in Poland to
concentration camps, starting with those people
viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak, and
the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, on
March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were
built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno,
Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all,
Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps
secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually
impossible.
Ghettoes and Concentration Camps

Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in
Poland to the Allied governments, who were
harshly criticized after the war for their failure to
respond, or to publicize news of the mass
slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the
Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was
also a result of the general incomprehension with
which news of the Holocaust was met and the
denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be
occurring on such a scale.
Ghettoes and Concentration
Camps

At Auschwitz alone, more than two
million people were murdered in a
process resembling a large-scale industrial
operation. A large population of Jewish
and non-Jewish inmates worked in the
labor camp there; though only Jews were
gassed, thousands of others died of
starvation or disease.
End of the War

On June 6, 1944, celebrated as D-Day, the
Allied Powers began a massive invasion of
Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian
and American soldiers on the beaches of
Normandy, France.

In response, Hitler poured all the
remaining strength of his army into
Western Europe, ensuring Germany's
defeat in the east.
End of the War

In his last will and political testament, dictated in
a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the
war on "International Jewry and its helpers" and
urged the German leaders and people to follow
"the strict observance of the racial laws and with
merciless resistance against the universal
poisoners of all peoples"--the Jews.

The following day, he committed suicide.
Germany's formal surrender in World War II
came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.