2. Life for Jews was a much simpler time, until Hitler became Germany‟s leader
in 1933, he made an anti-Semitism the official policy of the nation.
No other persecution of the Jews equals the extent and brutality of the
holocaust, Nazi Germany‟s systematic murder of European Jews.
Six million Jews, about two thirds of Europe‟s Jewish population would lose
their life!
5 to 6 million other people would also die in Nazi captivity.
CAN YOU SAY CRUEL AND INHUMANE!!!!
3. Early Nazi persecution aimed to exclude Germany„s Jews from all aspects of
the country‟s political, social, and economic life.
On April 1, 1933, the Nazis ordered a one-day boycott of businesses owned by
Jews.
In, 1935, the Nuremburg laws stripped the Jews citizenship, and outlawed
marriage between Jews and non-Jews.
In 1938, the Nazis enacted new policies to make life even more difficult for
the Jewish people.
Jews lost their jobs, surrender their own business for a fraction of what is what
worth, Jewish doctors and lawyer were forbidden to serve non-Jews, and
Jewish students were suspended from public schools.
Jews were defined as those who had 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents and whom
ever practice the Jewish religion.
They were also given new middle names Sarah(females) and Israel(males).
4. When Hitler first came to power, the Gestapo, Germany‟s new secret state
police, was formed to identify and pursue enemies of the Nazi regime.
Hitler also formed the SS, or Schutzstaffel, an elite guard that developed into
the private army of the Nazi party.
By 1939, the Gestapo had become part of the SS.
The duties of the SS were guarding the concentration camps.
In addition to Communist, the camp held “undesirable”, mainly Jews, but also
homosexual, Jehovah‟s Witnesses, Gypsies, and the homeless.
5. November 9, 1938, Nazi thugs throughout Germany and Austria looted and
destroyed Jewish stores, houses, and synagogues.
This incident became known as Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass”.
Nearly every synagogues was destroyed.
The Nazis arrested thousands of Jews, and shipped them off to the
concentration camp.
The damages of the Kristallnacht, were put upon the Jews to pay for.
The leftover Jews, sought any means possible to leave the country.
6. From 1933 through 1937, about 130,000 Jews, or one in four, fled Germany
with Nazi encouragement.
Most refugees moved to neighboring European nation, they began seeking
protection in the U.S., Latin America, British-ruled Palestine.
Few countries, welcomed Jewish refugees as long as the Depression prevented
their citizens from finding work.
President Roosevelt, called the International conference, held in France in July
1938, failed to deal with the situation.
With the exception of the Dominican Republic, each 32 nations represented,
including the United States, refused to open its doors to more immigrants.
7. As German armies overran most of Europe, more and more Jews, including
many who had fled Germany, came under their control.
In 1939, the invasion of Poland brought 2 million additional Jews under
German control.
Nazi plans for dealing with these Jews including the establishment of ghettos,
self-contained areas, usually surrounded by a fence, wall, or armed guard,
where Jews were forced to live.
In Warsaw, Nazis rounded up more than 400,000 Jews and confined them in
an area of less than 3% of the entire city.
They sealed the Warsaw ghetto with a wall topped with barbed wire and
guarded by Germans.
The Jews were starved and a lack of sanitation brought on disease. Thousands
of Jews died in the ghettos, but the Germans found more efficient way of
killing Jews.
8. During the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler ordered Einsatzgruppen, or
mobile killing squads, to shoot Communist political leaders as well as all Jews
in German-occupied territory.
They would round up their victims, and drove them to freshly dug pits, and
shot them.
In a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev, the Nazis killed more than 33,000
Jews in two days.
In January 1942, Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin
to agree on a new approach.
They developed a plan to achieve what one Nazi leader called the “final
solution to the Jewish question”.
This ultimate plan would lead to construction of special camps in Poland
where genocide, or deliberate destruction of an entire ethnic or cultural group,
was to be carried out against Europe‟ Jewish population.
9. The Nazis chose poison gas as a more effective way to kill people. A pesticide
called Zyklon B proved to be most efficient killer.
In January 1942, the Nazis opened a specially designed gas chamber disguised
as a shower room at the Auschwitz camp in western Poland.
Nazis outfitted six such camps, concentration camp, which functioned as
prisons and centers of forced labor, these death camps existed primarily for
mass media.
Jews in Poland, the Netherlands, Germany were crowded into train cars used
for transporting cattle.
After moving them, they were quickly inspected and women who were too old
or children that were too weak were immediately killed.
Jewish prisoners carried the dead to the crematoria, or huge ovens where the
bodies were burned.
Those selected to work endure unbearable conditions.
10. The life expectancy of a Jewish prisoner was a few months.
Men and women alike had their head shaven and a registered number tattooed
to their arms.
They were given one set of clothes and slept in crowded bunkers, there daily
meals were a cup of imitation coffee, piece of bread, and a soup made of
rotten vegetables.
Diseases swept through the camp and claimed many weak for harsh labor, and
starvation.
Others died from torture or cruel medical experiment.
The number of people killed in the labor and death camps is staggering.
At Auschwitz, 12,000 victims could be gassed and cremated in a single day,
the Nazis killed as many as 1.5 million people, 90% of Jews!
11. Some Jews resisted the Nazis. In Poland, France, and elsewhere, Jews joined
underground resistance groups.
Jews in several ghettos and camps took part in violence uprising.
In August 1934, rioting Jews damaged the Treblinka death camp so badly it
had to be closed.
Although, many of the uprising came too late to save many people, and were
crushed by the Germans.
Escape was the most common form of resistance, but most of the attempts
failed, or they were caught later. The were able to bring word of the death
camp to the outside world.
For 27 days, Jews were armed with little more than pistols and homemade
bombs held out against more than 2,000 Germans with tanks and artillery.
Although the Germans defeated the rebellion, Warsaw‟s Jew had brought the
deportation drive to a standstill, if only for a time.
12. The United States government knew about the mass murder of Jews by the
Nazis as early as November 1942.
Congress did not raise immigration quotas, and even the existing quotas for
Jews went unfilled.
Finally, in January 1944, over the objection of the State Department ,
Roosevelt created the War Refugees Board (WRB) to try to help threatened by
the Nazis.
The WRB‟s programs helped save some 200,000 lives.
As allied armies advanced in late 1944, the Nazis abandoned the camps
outside of Germany and moved onto their soils.
On that eve, thousand of Jews died on the death marches from camp to camp.
In 1945, Americans troops were able to witness the horrors of the holocaust
for the first time.
The U.S, Great Britain, Soviet Union, and France known as(International
Military Tribunal)conducted the Newburg Trails in Nov 1945. Of 24 Nazis, 12
of them receive the death sentence, and they were all held responsible for their
actions.