Anti -Semitism

1. Anti -Semitism This is the term given to political, social and economic agitation against Jews. In simple terms it means ‘Hatred of Jews’. Aryan Race This was the name of what Hitler believed was the perfect race. These were people with full German blood, blonde hair and blue eyes.

2. For hundreds of years Christian Europe had regarded the Jews as the Christ -killers. At one time or another Jews had been driven out of almost every European country. The way they were treated in England in the thirteenth century is a typical example. In 1275 they were made to wear a yellow badge. In 1287 269 Jews were hanged in the Tower of London. This deep prejudice against Jews was still strong in the twentieth century, especially in Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe, where the Jewish population was very large. After the First World War hundreds of Jews were blamed for the defeat in the War. Prejudice against the Jews grew during the economic depression which followed. Many Germans were poor and unemployed and wanted someone to blame. They turned on the Jews, many of whom were rich and successful in business.

3. Between 1939 and 1945 sixmillion Jews were murdered, along with millions of others, such as European Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled and the mentally ill.

4. Percentage of Jews killed in each country AUSTRIA 35% POLAND 91% USSR 36% NORWAY 45% BELGIUM 45% LUXEMBOURG 55% ESTONIA 44% ROMANIA 84% A Total of 6,000,000 Jews HUNGARY 74% YUGOSLAVIA 81% BOHEMIA 60% LATVIA 84% NETHERLANDS 71% LITHUANIA 85% GERMANY 36% FRANCE 22% GREECE 87%

5. A MAP OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEATH CAMPS USED BY THE NAZIS.

6. 16 of the 44 children taken from a French children’s home. They were sent to a concentration camp and later to Auschwitz. ONLY 1 SURVIVED A group of children at a concentration camp in Poland.

7. Part of a stockpile of Zyklon-B poison gas pellets found at Majdanek death camp. Before poison gas was used , Jews were gassed in mobile gas vans. Carbon monoxide gas from the engine’s exhaust was fed into the sealed rear compartment. Victims were dead by the time they reached the burial site.

8. Smoke rises as the bodies are burnt.

9. Portrait of two-year-old Mania Halef, a Jewish child who was among the 33,771 persons shot by the SS during the mass executions at Babi Yar, September, 1941.

10. Nazis sift through a huge pile of clothes left by victims of the massacre. Two year old Mani Halef’s clothes are somewhere amongst these.

11. Bales of hair shaven from women at Auschwitz, used to make felt-yarn. After liberation, an Allied soldier displays a stash of gold wedding rings taken from victims at Buchenwald.

12. In 1943, when the number of murdered Jews exceeded 1 million. Nazis ordered the bodies of those buried to be dug up and burned to destroy all traces. Soviet POWs at forced labor in 1943 exhuming bodies in the ravine at Babi Yar, where the Nazis had murdered over 33,000 Jews in September of 1941.

13. “Until September 14, 1939 my life was typical of a young Jewish boy in that part of the world in that period of time. I lived in a Jewish community surrounded by gentiles. Aside from my immediate family, I had many relatives and knew all the town people, both Jews and gentiles. Almost two weeks after the outbreak of the war and shortly after my Bar Mitzvah, my world exploded. In the course of the next five and a half years I lost my entire family and almost everyone I ever knew. Death, violence and brutality became a daily occurrence in my life while I was still a young teenager.” Leonard Lerer, 1991 WHY?

14. Not Just Jews…. • Before the beginning of World War II, the homosexual people in Germany, especially in Berlin, enjoyed more freedom and acceptance than anywhere else in the world. However, upon the rise of Adolf Hitler, gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, were two of several groups targeted by the Nazi Party and were ultimately among the roster of Holocaust victims

15. homosexuals within the Nazi Party itself were murdered. The Gestapo compiled lists of homosexuals, and they were compelled to sexually conform to the German norm. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and many were incarcerated in concentration camps. The leading scholar Ruediger Lautman believes that the death rate in concentration camps of imprisoned homosexuals may have been as high as sixty percent (for Jews it was 45%). Homosexuals in camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors, and were also persecuted by their fellow inmates. This was a factor in the relatively high death rate for homosexuals, compared to other "anti-social groups".

16. Some gay men who resisted the SS had their fingernails pulled out. Others were raped with broken rulers and had their bowels punctured, causing them to bleed profusely and often die. At the concentration camp at Schirmeck, during a morning roll-call, the Nazi commander announced a public execution. An accused homosexual man was brought out, and the Nazi guards stripped the clothes off the prisoner and placed a metal bucket over his head. Then the guards released trained German Shepherd dogs on him, which mauled him to death.

17. Erwin Schimitzek, ClerkBorn Feb 16th, 1918 in Breslau (Wroclaw)Interned in Auschwitz on Aug 28th, 1941Died on Feb 28th, 1942, aged 24 years

18. The Porajmos, literally Devouring, or Samudaripen (Mass killing) is a term coined by the Roma (Gypsy) people to describe attempts by the Nazi regime to exterminate most of the Roma peoples of Europe during The Holocaust. The phenomenon has been little studied and largely overshadowed by the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews). The term was introduced into the literature by Roma scholar and activist Ian Hancock, in the early 1990s, though he did not coin the term. • Because the Roma communities of Eastern Europe were less organized than the Jewish communities, it is more difficult to assess the actual number of victims, though it is believed to range from 200,000 to 2,000,000. Only in recent years has the Roma community begun to demand acceptance among the victims of the Nazi regime. The response so far has been mixed.

19. The vast majority of Roma were to suffer the same indignities as the Jews, and in some instances, they suffered even more brutally. They were herded into ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June, 1942), where they formed a distinct subclass. According to Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Gypsies were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted • "..To toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed." • Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen (intervention groups) tracked down Roma encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims.

20. German soldiers of the Waffen-SS and the Reich Labor Service look on as a member of Einsatzgruppe D murders a man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942.

21. A group of Gypsy prisoners, awaiting instructions from their German captors, sit in an open area near the fence in the Belzec concentration camp