Understanding Genocide: A Deep Dive Into History

1. genocide Holocaust Armenian Cambodian Rwandan Great Purge

2. genocide • The systematic and purposeful destructionof a racial, political, religious, or cultural group • Systematic and purposeful • Destruction: large scale annihilation; • Racial, political, religious, or cultural group Are the Atomic Bomb droppings a Genocide? Is the Rape of Nanking a Genocide?

3. Genocide characteristics • Large numbers of people are eliminated. • The order for mass murder is given by someone in authority. • The acts are legitimated by culture/tradition. • Victims are dehumanized, only part of a group. • The killing is organized and pre-meditated. • The process is rationalized for perpetrators. • Perpetrators refuse to accept responsibility for the killing. • The genocide is a means to a particular end.

4. Examples of 20th century genocides Great Purge 1930’s Cambodian 1970’s Armenian 1915 Holocaust 1939-1944 Rwandan 1944

5. holocaust Holo= Caust= Greek word "holos"(whole) Greek word "kaustos"(burned) Historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar… After WW2, it took on a new meaning….

6. holocaust • Why did Hitler hate Jews? • Blamed them for Germany loosing WW1 • Blamed for the Treaty of Versailles • Blamed them for the Great Depression There is really no clear answer or concrete logic as to why Hitler thought the Jews were responsible for all the above. It was just something in his own twisted head. • QUICK REVIEW: • Hitler served in the German Army during WW1 • Hitler joined the Nazi Party after WW1 (National Socialist German Workers' Party ) • Tried unsuccessfully to take over Weimar Republic in the 1923was imprisoned. • While imprisoned, wrote Mein Kampf extreme anti-Semitism, nationalism, Lebensraum, Aryan master race, Third Reich • Released from Prison tried successfully again to take over Germany after the depression. • His popular solutions to economic problems allowed him to have a legal appointment as Chancellor within a year he was the Fuhrer

7. holocaust 1935: Nuremburg Laws established 1938: Night of Broken Glass 1939: Hitler invades Poland puts all the Jewish-Poles in Ghettos that are surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. Plagued by disease, poverty, hunger, etc. Confiscated their land to give to ethnic Germans. (lebensraum??) 1940: Hitler was conquering territories all over Eastern Europe.(Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, Soviet Union) Started to transport the Jewish populations to ghettos. 1941: “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem official 1941:every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow star, 1941: experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing using POWs 1941:  mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young 1941-1944: Concentration camps at their peak 1944: German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy's front line. These so-called "death marches" continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people. 1945: Allies begin to liberate camps, Hitler commits suicide, Germany surrenders. 1945-1946: Nuremburg Trails

8. holocaust • 5 major death camps established: • Belzec • Chelmno • Sobibor • Treblinka • Majdanek • Auschwitz • 12,000Jews were killed every day. The Holocaust killed about 6 million Jews total. That is about 1/3 of the world Jewish population. • Those killed did not just include Jews. Gypsies, handicapped, homosexuals etc. were sent to the camps, as they did not fit the mold of the Master Race. The Jewish population was, however, the only group with a complete extermination plan.

9. holocaust • Tracing the life of a Jewish person in Poland 1939-1944 • Nuremburg Laws- stripped of citizenship. • If you survived the domestic uprisings, then you were forced to give up your home and sent to live in a ghetto. • If you survived the conditions of a ghettos, you were put on a train and transported to a camp. • If you survived the conditions of the train, you walk through the front entrance of a concentration camp. • Your fate was then decided. Men and women separated. If you could work, your life was spared to do forced labor. If you were of no use to the Nazi war effort you were sent to the gas chambers. • If you survived the concentration camp, you were sent on a death march • If you survived the death march and the camps… how do you rebuild your life?

10. HOLOCAUST Video

11. holocaust LET’S PRACTICE TOGETHER ON HOW THE HOLCAUST EXEMPLIFIES GENOCIDE After, you will start a stations activity concerning other 20th century examples of Genocide